


The Skies Rain Fire

by AOnceToldStory



Category: The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst and Feels, M/M, Modern Setting, Possible Character Death, Slow Romance, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-11
Updated: 2015-10-20
Packaged: 2018-04-27 07:36:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 34,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5039578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AOnceToldStory/pseuds/AOnceToldStory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thomas, Newt and Minho are ordinary teenage boys with ordinary lives and ordinary problems — until they are caught in the middle of a surprise attack on their country. Thrown headfirst onto a fiery battleground, they must stick together to survive, but a lot of things change when you are at war and the price for life is higher than ever. [War AU, modern day]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When the bell finally rang, signalling his freedom from Mrs. Paige’s stress-inducing lecture, Thomas all but ran for the door. Shoving his textbook and writing supplies into his backpack he left the classroom with a curt nod to Mrs. Paige. She eyed him unimpressed until he was out of sight in the corridor overflowing with students. Thomas had not turned in his biology essay today either, and he knew that he was pushing his luck with this woman. He had sat with the paper last night, working on the final touches to make it perfect, but it just wasn’t good enough. His A in biology was on the line, and only an A-worthy assignment could save him. Then again, if he did not turn in the paper on Monday, he could kiss his perfect grade goodbye for good.

He elbowed his way through the crowds to his locker and turned in the combination with ease. He scanned the contents of the narrow space with a sigh — so many books he should be taking home over the weekend. The biology book had made a semi-permanent home in his bag, but eventually Thomas settled for letting the French textbook and his notes from history class join it. He doubted that he’d have time to go over the notes, but there were A’s to be had in that class too and it couldn’t hurt to bring them along.

Thomas moved to the side a bit when his locker mate came up with his arms full of books. Siggy flashed him a smile that broke into a yawn so wide Thomas had to laugh.

"Oh, sorry, man," Siggy said and wiped the yawn tears from his round face. "Gon’ sleep for two days when I get home."

"Didn’t sleep in class, then?"

Siggy furrowed his bushy, dark brows and smacked his lips. He pulled his locker open and dropped the books haphazardly on the bottom. "Janson called me out yesterday, said one more time and I’ll be spending the rest of the semester in detention. Man, ain’t no chill in him. Get on his bad side once, you better watch your step all year."

Thomas rolled his eyes and zipped up his backpack before swinging it over his shoulder. He scanned his locker one more time, then shut the door and mixed the combination. "Well, you have a good one, see ya Monday," he said and gave Siggy a pat on the back.

"And you, man," Siggy replied.

The rush of students had already come and gone, everyone equally ready for the weekend to start. Thomas walked the long hallway, listening in on small groups of friends talking about movie nights and parties they were going to. A girl with a long, blond braid smelling of sweat exited the gym as Thomas passed, speaking loudly on the phone with someone.

"Give me an hour," she said. "You come pick me up in an hour, I’ll be ready, I swear…"

The rest of her conversation faded away behind him. Everyone seemed to have plans, and Thomas knew that many were going to the same party tonight. It was the Carpenter siblings who had arranged an Oktoberfest of sorts at their place, free for all. A corner of Thomas’s mouth shot up — he had other plans for tonight, and they didn’t include awkward eye contact or trying to stay away from Gally Carpenter in the guy’s own backyard.

The chilly air hit Thomas like a wall when he left the school building. Autumn had come fast once the unusually warm September gave way, and Thomas had yet to break out his thick jacket from deep within his closet. He had a scarf on, but it didn’t make much of a difference. He wrapped his arms around himself and quickened his step. Suddenly the parking lot was way too far for his liking. He rounded the corner of the outdoor stadium and saw the dark red Ford Focus parked by the road, ready to go. He smiled.

With Newt by the wheel and Minho riding shotgun, Thomas had little choice but to hop in the backseat. Dark rock ballads blared from the blown out speakers and comfortable, hot air leaked out when Thomas opened the door. He hurried to close the door behind him and made a _brrr_ sound just to amplify the cold to his friends.

"No jacket? Mine’s in the back if you want it," Newt said and glanced at Thomas in the rearview mirror.

"Just turn up the heat," Thomas sneered.

Newt did as he was asked, then hit the gas and turned out onto the road, away from Balmier High and toward the long awaited weekend. A song they all liked came on the radio and they sang together in broken voices, the notes more false than not. Minho’s singing wasn’t so bad, but he had never been interested in music much. None of them cared how they sounded, they knew each other too well. Newt drummed on the steering wheel while Thomas played air guitar in the back. Minho pulled down the visor and sang into the make-up mirror, an invisible microphone in hand.

The three of them had rode to and from school together like this ever since Newt had moved in from The East two years ago. He was a year older and owned a car, the lucky bastard. Before that, Thomas and Minho had taken the dreaded half-hour ride with school bus. Minho took his driver’s license on his 17th birthday but had never afforded a car, and Thomas just never came around to it. School took up too much of his time considering what collage he wanted to go to next year.

Thomas knew that their little trio was going to have to split up after graduation, and it hurt him a lot. He was aiming higher than most, his interest for the biological sciences having grown considerably during high school. There were no such programs at their local university, the closest being three cities away. Thomas wasn’t sure what Minho wanted, but probably something sports related. He was the best track runner there was his age, and he’d won the Young Hearts Charity Marathon three years in a row. But wherever Minho went, it couldn’t be farther away than a long car ride could solve.

Newt, on the other hand, was planning something completely different. He’d talked about it a few times, put the idea out there. Of course nothing was certain yet, but it still clenched Thomas’ heart when he thought about it — Newt wanted to go back to his home country. He had never wanted to move to The West when his father found new love, and although he seemed to like it here now, he missed home a lot. Thomas could see it in his eyes in history class.

Thoughts like this made their way through the rocking music into Thomas’s consciousness, but he shook them off. It was only October, and lots of things could still happen.

Newt turned off the main road into a neighbourhood of smaller houses with little patches of grass and gardens. Most looked exactly the same, although dressed in different states of luxury or neglect. About ten rows of houses down the road, Newt pulled up on the sidewalk and stopped the car.

He turned around in the seat to face Thomas. "I guess you ain’t coming to the party tonight, then?"

Thomas felt just the tiniest tinge of guilt, but is washed away quickly. The corner of his mouth shot upwards again in an innocent but cheeky smile. "Sorry, baby, I’m booked for the evening." Newt raised one eyebrow and smiled smugly, knowing exactly what Thomas had planned and with who.

Minho gave Newt a hurtful look. "What, ain’t I good enough to dance with?" He put his hand over his heart and pouted.

Newt rolled his eyes and they all laughed, then Thomas grabbed his and Minho’s backpacks and they exited the car. They waved as Newt made a u-turn on the street and drove off back the way he’d come. He had dropped them off on Thomas’s driveway, which was empty at the moment. His mom had already left for work then.

"See ya for the run tomorrow?" Thomas asked and handed Minho his backpack, which was considerably lighter than his own.

"Bright and early, sunshine, I got practice at eleven," Minho winked.

Thomas grabbed his outstretched hand and they bumped shoulders — their usual goodbye — then Minho took off in a jog down the street. He lived in the only green house in the neighbourhood, only three doors down. That’s how they had met so many years ago, on a barbecue held by another neighbour.

Thomas fished the keys from his pocket and unlocked the front door. It was dark inside and dead silent. A homely smell of cooked meat and brown sauce hung in the air, making Thomas’s stomach growl longingly.

"Mom?" he called just for the fun of it, enjoying the silence that followed. Not that he minded his mom being home, but with all the things he had planned for tonight it was much more fun to have the house to himself.

After all, it had been almost a year since he’d seen Teresa last.

He kicked off his shoes and turned into the kitchen, where a little lunchbox sat on the dinner table with a folded note standing on top of it. Eat up, back Sunday, it said simply, and then a kiss of bright red lipstick in the corner. Thomas popped the lunchbox in the microwave for a couple of minutes, then sat down and enjoyed the steaming hot concoction of mushroom sauce on thin steaks and mashed potatoes. All the while thinking about Teresa.

They weren’t _a thing_ , as people around him continuously assumed. Thomas didn’t _have the hots for her_ as Minho liked to point out. But he had missed her like crazy this past year, and he’d been looking forward to this little reunion for weeks. She had gone as an exchange student to a faraway country, and the huge time difference had made keeping in touch difficult. A few texts now and then, a call or two. Not that they needed to talk much — their parents had known each other since way before they were born, so Teresa and Thomas had practically grown up together. That’s why Thomas knew exactly what he was going to do to surprise her tonight.

He put away the dishes and went into the living room, which was pitch black now since darkness was falling outside. He lit the light chains in the bookshelves and brought out a few candleholders from the cupboard to place on the coffee table. He had already rented two of Teresa’s favourite movies in an online store, and their favourite game, The Ones Who Came Back, lay ready to be played by the TV. He checked the cabinets in the kitchen and found the two bags of chocolate-coated popcorn and taco chips he’d asked his mom to buy earlier. He poured them into matching bowls, put them on the coffee table and stepped back to take in the whole living room.

Perfect. He checked his watch — twenty past six, leaving him forty minutes to take a shower and get dressed. More than enough time.

He hopped in the shower and turned the heat of the water way up. He liked the scorching feeling of it, although the steam took hours to vent out afterwards. He even decided to wash his hair. He had just put the shampoo in there and massaged up a good lather when the lights in the bathroom died.

The sudden blackness caught Thomas off guard and he almost slipped where he stood. He turned the water off and reached out to flip the light switch, but nothing happened. He let out an exasperated sigh — a power outage was definitely not part of the plan tonight. He turned the water back on and blindly rinsed the shampoo out of his hair. Then he got out, found the towel where he’d left it on the toilet seat and dried himself off. As he made his way to the kitchen in the dark he tried every other light switch but none of them worked. He figured that his entire neighbourhood was effected by the blackout since he could not see any lights through the windows across the street.

A little faith returned to him when he entered the living room and found that the candles he’d lit made the room look very cozy. Perhaps they could have a fun night after all once Teresa showed up.

Thomas grabbed his phone from the sofa armrest and checked for any messages. Nothing but some stupid Facebook notification about the Carpenters’ party. He went in on his message history with Teresa. Her last text was from this morning when she wrote that she was boarding her last flight home in about an hour. Thomas tapped the message bar and typed in a quick text.

_power’s out here :P but there’s still board games ;)_

He hit send and tossed the phone on the sofa, then grabbed it again when he realised how dark the house was. He turned on the camera flashlight and went back to his room where he towelled himself off. He grabbed whatever lay on top in his drawers and ended up wearing grey soft pants and a long-sleeved, green shirt. He didn’t care much what Teresa thought of his looks.

He checked his phone again — ten to seven, and no reply from Teresa. That’s when he saw the little red text right below his last message. Failed to send, it said. When he looked at the top of the screen, he saw a little red cross where his signal bars should have been.

"Great," he said out loud. No electricity, and no way to contact Teresa.

He went back to the living room and sat down on the sofa to play some games on his phone. It was the only piece of entertainment there was as long as the power was out. He put on some tunes to cancel out the silence, and then he waited.

And waited. A lump was forming in his stomach. The clock on the top of his screen ticked past seven, then half past seven, then a quarter to eight. At eight o’clock Thomas had enough. He looked up Teresa’s cell number in his contacts and went to the house phone in the kitchen. He hadn’t even dialled the number yet when he realised what was missing — a tone. Phone line was dead, too.

Thomas slammed the phone back in place a little too hard and it fell right off again. He put it back a little gentler, then went back to the sofa and laid down. What could he do? He couldn’t even call Teresa to see if she was alright and on her way. He couldn’t check the internet for information on the blackout or if her flight was delayed for some reason.

Annoyed and a bit uneasy, Thomas did the only thing he could think off. He pulled a pillow below his head and made himself comfortable, then tried to go to sleep with the music still playing on his phone. He turned a few times on the small sofa, but eventually the long week of school got to him and he drifted off into unconsciousness.

He woke up what felt like hours later by a loud, weird sound coming from all around him. It faded in and out, like the growl of engines on a very old truck driving by, but from above. Thomas rose up and rubbed his eyes groggily before walking over to the window to check what it was. Some half-asleep part of his brain knew what the sound was, but it wasn’t until he saw them that his mind snapped wide awake in realisation.

Airplanes. Dozens of small, dark-painted airplanes dotting the black sky above. He stared at them in disbelief as his insides coiled up. This wasn’t right. It wasn’t real, yet his every cell knew that it was awake and not dreaming. Thomas’s muscles tensed and he wanted to back away from the window, but his curiosity was stronger than fear.

Just then, a _boom_ so loud it could break his eardrums sounded somewhere nearby and an explosion of light pierced the darkness. A split second later, the windows on Thomas’s house shattered inwards.


	2. Chapter 2

Thomas lay curled up in a ball on the floor while liquid heat seemed to seep from every hole in his body. He remained perfectly still, too afraid to move, for a very long time. His face stung like a thousand needles but he pushed his hands against it anyway. He drew sharp breaths but nothing seemed to provide enough oxygen. A howl, skull-splitting and sharp, penetrated his ears from the inside, dulling out any other sounds. It wasn't an unrealistic feeling anymore that his curiosity could drown out — his every braincell screamed it, loud enough to overpower the ringing in his ears.

Those airplanes had just dropped a bomb on him.

No, not on him. He let one eye peek through his fingers. His house still stood firm although everything made of glass had been shattered by the shockwave. That much he could process. Disoriented and hurting all over, Thomas moved his hands away from his face. It hurt, like wiggling splinters before pulling them out only ten times worse. He tried to open his eyes completely, but it hurt too much to move his left eyelid. Instinctively his hand shot up over the eye, but the pain that followed was excruciating. He let out a cry and felt tears blur his vision. He could see with both eyes, that much he had to be happy for, but when he carefully touched his eye area with his fingertips he could feel it. A shard of glass sat deep in the outer corner of his left eye, and blood ran like tears from the wound. He tried pulling on it, but the pain was too much.

Another explosion penetrated the ringing in his ears, this one a lot farther away. This time Thomas flew to his feet, stumbling backwards and slipping when shards of the crushed window panes bore into the soles of his feet. But he didn't stop. He ran. He hurled himself head first away from the windows and into the kitchen, catching himself on chairs and sending the dishes on the counter flying when he stumbled into it. He ripped the phone from its holder and dialled the three familiar digits like clockwork, only to let the phone fall to the floor in dumbstruck shock when he remembered that it wouldn't work.

His hands went to his face again, as if covering it would help against the pain of his eye wound. He was suddenly very aware of the blood covering his palms, and it sent his heart into an even more panicked beating frenzy. He heard screaming, terrified screaming, and thought it might be him, but he could barely breathe, let alone make a sound. Then he looked to his side, out the now glassless kitchen windows.

There were his neighbours, running both directions on the street, carrying fire extinguishers and children, screaming in horror or barking out orders at each other. And behind them, behind the closest row of houses with their busted windows on the other side, Thomas saw fire.

The skyline of his city, a dark silhouette against an even darker background, engulfed in smoke and glowing flames. The airplanes flying over it, only little dots to his eyes. He witnessed as an explosion of fire rose to the sky far far away, and heard the distant blast. And, for some unexplained reason too bizarre for Thomas to comprehend, the sight made him think about Gally Carpenter's party.

 _Newt_. _Minho_.

Their names flipped a series of switches in Thomas's head. He fell backwards out of his stupor until his behind hit the edge of the dinner table, then used a chair as support as he slid down onto the floor. With one hand still protecting his injured eye, Thomas pulled off his socks and brushed away the glass splinters from his feet. They hadn't gone deep, his soles being very thick and hard, so he was in luck. Then he crawled on all fours into the hallway, grabbed the first pair of shoes he could reach, put them on and pulled himself up by the heater on the wall.

Locking his wiggly knees beneath him, Thomas shoved the door open and stumbled onto the driveway. Windows or no windows, the noises were much louder out here. He was hit by a wall of heat, the complete opposite of what he had expected, and a smell so harsh it tickled his nose and burnt his throat. It wasn't hard to see what was causing all this. When Thomas went out onto the sidewalk, it was there like an enormous beacon.

About three houses down the neighbourhood stopped abruptly, the rest of it replaced by a wide crater and a sea of fire. Several houses around the hole were on fire too, people running desperately back and forth with little buckets of water and trying to rescue cars and portable belongings. Thomas stood and watched the inferno, his heart dropping farther by the second. The playground lay beyond the border of the raging fire, a place he'd spend countless days in during childhood. Mr. and Mrs. Hannes's house was simply gone, not even the silhouette of it visible through the flames. From here, Thomas could see Minho's parents' car buried in rubble, its windows shattered, the house behind it reduced to a wooden skeleton slowly falling apart.

Thomas realised what he was looking at, but his feet were way ahead of him. He moved toward the street, bumping into a man he didn't see, watching his best friend's house get swallowed by flames.

"Minho," he breathed, then it all came out in shouts. "Minho! _Minho_!"

He broke into a sprint, calling out his friend's name, the heat searing his skin as he got too close. He was only meters from the car when someone grabbed him from behind. The big arms wrapped around his waist and literally lifted him into the air, swinging him to the side to stop him from running straight into the inferno.

"You can't, son! It's coming down any second!" The person screamed in his ear, but Thomas didn't listen. He called Minho's name until it sounded weird to him. Fought the hands that held him back half-heartedly, too afraid to break free. When he finally stopped struggling, the person grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him around.

It was Axel Rogen, their next door neighbour, a dark man with the body of a weightlifter. "Son, where's your mother?" he demanded.

"A-at work," Thomas stuttered, the smoke and tears making it hard to form words.

"Find her," Rogen said, more of an order than a suggestion. Then he shoved Thomas in the opposite direction of the fires. "Run, boy!"

Thomas barely kept his feet as he stumbled backwards away from Rogen. Then the man turned around and headed for the closest standing house, where people were hurrying back and forth with water for the fires. Thomas took one last look at the tower of flames that had once been Minho's home, then he turned around.

He ran, faster than he'd ever run in his life before.

His hand was over his left eye again, clutching the wound even though it hurt so bad. The blood made it very difficult to see, the tears caused by the terror and the smoke only made it worse. But he moved forward, down the street toward the main road. The ringing in his ears was fading, but in its place was the chorus of panicked screaming and crackling fires all around. One quick look at the sky revealed that the planes were gone, but Thomas swore he could still hear their engines far away.

The closer he got to the main road, the more cars drove past him, and at higher speeds. It couldn't even be called traffic anymore, just a mass of vehicles trying their best to flee the city as fast as they could. Thomas was barely missed by a small Toyota going up on the sidewalk to get past the line of other cars blocking the road ramp.

It wasn't long before Thomas's heart couldn't take it anymore. He breathed fast and hard but couldn't provide enough oxygen to go another step. Exhausted and winded he clung to a lamp post and held on with sweaty hands. He refused to sit down no matter how much his legs hurt, because if he did he didn't know if he could get up again. He closed his eyes hard, wincing from the shard of glass in his eye.

 _Where am I going?_ he asked himself. His mother worked two towns over, an impossible distance on foot. He had no other relatives or family in the city. _What am I supposed to do!?_

Someone ran straight into him where he stood, knocking the wind out of him as their bodies collided against the light post. The person, a woman clutching a baby in her bare arms, didn't look twice at him before continuing down the street. Drivers honked their horns and yelled out the windows at other cars. Smoke gathered and lay like a cover over the city, with no winds to blow them away. Now too far away from any fires to warm him, the crisp evening air sent chills through Thomas's body.

He knew where he was going now. He couldn't get to his mom, no matter how worried he was for her. He had no way of knowing where Teresa was. There were only two people left who Thomas could not live without knowing if they were okay. His breath caught in his throat at the thought of Minho's burning house and suddenly he wanted to go back.

 _No_ , he commanded himself. _The Carpenter party. Newt is there. Minho's gotta be there too._

He knocked his forehead into the lamp post once in frustration, let out a ragged breath, then set off down the lightless street again.

Thomas quickly realised what lay between him and Shelby Quarters where Gally and Ruth Carpenter lived — the highway. The four lane, 120 kilometres per hour road that split their precious city in half, and that now would be overflowing with southbound traffic. The closest crossing on foot was two blocks in the wrong direction, and Thomas did not have the patience or calm of mind to think about safety. He followed the main road in the general direction of Shelby Quarters, taking shortcuts where he remembered them. He had entered a part of the town that was untouched by the horrors of his own neighbourhood, but the stank of things burning was still in the air.

As he pushed himself beyond his limits, running when his legs felt ready to snap and his lungs burned, Thomas stopped listening to anything but his own heartbeat. That's why, when the rising noise of churning engines caught his attention, a new air raid was already upon him. He looked up and saw the exact same thing he'd seen from his living room right before the explosion — an uneven formation of small aircrafts, painted in some dark shade of blue with little emblems on the underside of the wings. They were fast, reaching him in a matter of seconds. But these ones didn't drop any bombs, or he would've heard them. Thomas's instincts still told him to run and hide until they were gone, but once more he was struck by the unrealism of it all. Those planes spoke of war, and The West was a peaceful country. There hadn't been war here for many hundreds of years if Thomas remembered his history correctly.

He watched them fly over him and merge with the dark sky and the smoke, heading straight for the city centre. He hoped against hope that they would not start dropping those firebombs again. Once they were far away enough for Thomas to be safe, he still feared for Shelby Quarters.

He could almost hear the hatches open on the undersides of the closest airplanes, letting loose load after load of little black cylinders. Thomas's stomach turned inside out as, one by one, the cylinders hit the ground, detonating with huge blasts of light and sending waves of fire all around them.

"No…" _This isn't happening. It isn't real._

A new dose of adrenalin was pumping through his veins, and it sent him flying through the streets once more. He came out on another stretch of the main road, this one also overflowing with cars. Traffic didn't move at all anymore, and people were abandoning their cars. Most people stood watching the bombs drop over the city centre, tears on their faces and eyes mirroring the same disbelief that Thomas felt. Some held little children in their arms, others hugged their loved ones like the world was ending.

Thomas didn't stop. All he wanted was to find Newt and Minho.

When he finally got up on the highway he found himself in luck. The traffic was at a complete standstill — why, he did not want to know. It was easy for him to move between the cars and cross the four southbound lanes. The northbound lanes, leading straight for the city and the still ongoing bombing, were empty and even easier to cross. Thomas ran for the nearest exit road and followed it down into Shelby Quarters.

From there, the going was almost too easy. This area seemed untouched by the firebombs, and therefor its inhabitants were in a slightly less chaotic state. Most stood on their porches and in the streets, staring and pointing at the burning skyline of the city. The Carpenter house wasn't far now. Thomas's heart was giving up again, but he pushed himself. He turned a corner and there it was, a two-story villa painted white and grey, its front decorated with large bushes and ivy vines. With no lights the house would look dead if not for the mass of teenagers that crowded the street. Their terrified chatter got louder as Thomas approached, and he recognised many of their faces from school.

But he couldn't see his friends.

When he came up to the crowds he grabbed the closest girl, a petite redhead he couldn't remember the name of, by the shoulders and turned her around.

"Have you seen Newt and Minho? Are they here?"

He had spoken so quickly that she didn't catch it, but the sight of Thomas shocked her. "Oh my goodness! Are you okay? Your eye!"

She reached up to touch the wound, but Thomas didn't stay to answer her question. Over the girl's shoulder he had seen something else — a blue Ford Focus, parked on the opposite side of the street. Thomas elbowed his way through a group of teenagers, and as he did, someone came around the other side of the car. Tall and slender and blond hair standing on end — Thomas would recognise Newt anywhere.

His heart leaped in his chest, so happy was he to see that his friend was alright. He jogged over, his legs aching and every breath burning in his chest. Newt turned around just as Thomas came up to him. His black eyes grew wide and his mouth fell open when he saw Thomas. He had barely reached the car before Newt dragged him into an embrace so tight it hurt his shoulders. Thomas wrapped his arms around Newt's waist, felt the blond's hand on his neck pushing down.

"Bloody hell, Tommy," Newt said, then let go and pulled away. A new wave of worry came over him when he laid eyes on the wound by Thomas's eye. "Your eye! What happened?"

Although he'd seen the whole thing with his own eyes, Thomas suddenly lost the ability to describe any of it. For a split second he relived the moment his windows had shattered and sent him sprawling on the floor. All pain that adrenalin had kept at bay came rushing back under Newt's worried stare.

"They… dropped a bomb on me," was all Thomas could say on the matter. It still sounded unreal. "Where's Minho?"

"He's inside looking for my bloody car keys," Newt said, an anxious anger rising with every word. He kicked at one of the tires on the car.

Thomas was already heading for the house. "Let's get him and get out of here."

"Wait," Newt said, his hand on Thomas's arm holding him back. "Your eye needs—"

"Minho first," Thomas interrupted, grabbing Newt's hand and pulling him along. "Then me."


	3. Chapter 3

It was easier said than done to locate one guy in a large house filled to the brim with anxious, worried, frightened teenagers. Everybody had put down their drinks and sat huddled on the couches or stood by the windows overlooking the city in the distance. The tension could be sliced with a butter knife, the soft soundtrack of crying and empty attempts at consoling each other making the world seem even more bleak than it already was. Thomas ran into Gally, who by means of shoving and shouting was trying to get people into the basement to hide. The large boy turned around to look at him and stopped dead in his tracks, scanning him up and down with an unusual sympathy in his blue-grey eyes. There was panic in there too, buried underneath years of acting the strong, bad boy in school.

Newt came up beside Thomas. "Minho. You've seen him?" he asked Gally.

Gally thought about it for one second, still taken aback by Thomas's messed up appearance. "Upstairs," he said shortly, then nodded to assure them he was certain. He moved past them and continued to forcefully direct the masses toward the basement.

Thomas headed for the stairs, pushing people aside to reach it faster, Newt trailing him close behind. Thomas tried taking the steps two at a time, but his knees were so weak from the running that he stumbled and hit his shins on the stairs. Newt helped push him upwards, past a couple of girls running the other way. Even though people were moving around in obvious unease, a weird calmness had fallen over the house.

_The fire bombs did not hit anywhere near here_ , Thomas thought. _They didn't see it up close_. Images of Minho's burning house and the streets littered with shards of glass flashed before his eyes. He blinked hard when sweat ran into his eyes, but the motion only sent a new wave of pain from his eye wound and reminded him of how his world had been screwed over.

The second floor was nearly empty, but the signs of a lively party lay scattered everywhere — empty glasses and half-finished drinks, a jacket and a purse and a phone. Like everyone had just dropped everything in their hands when they realised that the planes flying by were about to set their lives on fire. Two girls were standing by the window in the hallway, holding each other tightly while watching the flames in the dark distance. One was the blonde who had come out of the gym at school earlier, a girl Thomas recognised from art class. The other was Harriet, an admirable, scary-looking chick from his homeroom.

"Sonya," Newt hasted, startling both girls so that they turned around. "Is Minho up here?"

"I'm right here."

Minho came around the corner just then. He stopped and looked around him nervously at Newt and the girls, his entire body on edge and breathing shallow breaths. Then he saw Thomas, and an unreadable mixture of horror and relief came across his face.

"Thomas, what the—"

He never got to finish the sentence. A choir of screams started outside the house, then spread inwards through the crowds downstairs. Newt was at the top of the stairs instantly, looking down to see what was going on. Minho's eyes locked with Thomas's, both boys filling up with fear all over again, silently commanding themselves and each other not to panic.

Gally was yelling at people again, so loud his voice cracked. "Everybody to the basement! Now!"

The five people standing in the upstairs hallway seemed to freeze where they were. The rush of movement downstairs didn't seem to break their fear-induced stupor. Sonya and Harriet looked out the window, Thomas and Minho at each other, Newt at the floor. Time and space slowed down to a halt, but only for a split second.

Then their ears caught the sound slowly approaching — growls like engines on an old truck.

Minho must have seen the color drain from Thomas's face, because his reaction was the strongest. "Downstairs!" he called so loud Thomas's ears started ringing again.

Then Minho proceeded to shove his entire body into Thomas, knocking him backwards into Newt with a force that sent the blond boy tumbling headfirst down the steps. But, as if Minho's cry had broken some kind of lock in his brain, Thomas didn't stop moving. Survival instinct took over, made him blind to pain or fatigue. Newt found his footing in front of him, Minho's hands were behind him, pushing him forward and down. The sounds of the oncoming bomber planes grew louder with each passing second.

Newt stumbled onto the first floor, but stopped dead in his tracks and looked around. He didn't know where the basement was, and although he heard the screams of his school mates from somewhere, he couldn't see anyone. Thomas, Minho and the girls came crashing into his back, but he simply did not know which way to go.

In this short moment of confusion, the growling noises reached its climax, and another, more high-pitched sound took over. Within the next second Minho ran past Newt, grabbed him by the collar of his shirt to make him move, pulling Thomas along by the hand. He knew where the basement was.

Too late.

* * *

When Minho came to he expected darkness, but that wasn't what he found. He'd been half awake for some time, concentrating on drawing slow breaths although every movement of his chest felt like a bench pressing session. The air was warm, bordering on hot, on his torso and right arm, while a cool breeze brushed his left arm. A fire crackled not far away, an almost peaceful sound in an otherwise overwhelming silence. He tried to cough, the air heavy with dust and smoke, but there was literally something preventing his chest from rising very far. So he slowly opened his eyes, staring straight up onto a jagged surface where the orange light of fire danced barely half a metre from his face. Then he tried bending his neck to see what was weighing so heavily on his chest.

There was Newt's face resting on his upper right arm, eyes closed and mouth hanging open. Cuts and bloodstains spotted the skin, making his pale face look even whiter. There was a gash about the size of a golf ball just underneath the blond hairline, and his lips looked dry and swollen. It was Newt's body, pressed between Minho's chest and whatever had fallen on top of them, that strained Minho's breathing.

His heart contracted. Newt looked completely and undeniably dead.

"Newt," he said, but it came out as more of a pained grunt between hissing breaths. "Newt."

His throat was bone dry, his tongue feeling like moist sandpaper, but he kept whispering Newt's name. He tried reaching up with his left arm but couldn't move it very far. He lifted his right arm until he found the back of Newt's head and shook him gently to rouse him.

"Come on, Newton, wake up," he breathed, feeling the panic boiling up inside him. Newt wasn't responding at all.

He shook harder, spoke as loud as he could but nothing worked. He held his breath for as long as he could, trying to feel if Newt's chest was moving against his, but he couldn't stop shaking and he needed the air desperately. Whenever he exhaled, the weight of Newt and the debris seemed to come down even more.

He tried something else — he pressed Newt's head down so that his face was buried in Minho's shirt. He was careful not to block off Newt's airways completely, and then he waited. And sure as hell, after a few minutes Minho swore on the Gods that he could feel warmth and moisture through the fabric.

"I knew you wouldn't leave me alone in this screwed up world," Minho sighed, the relief soothing his every muscle.

No longer so afraid, Minho let his head fall back and his strained neck rest for a bit. He used his free arm to stroke Newt's hair and back, hoping that the movement would wake him up sooner or later. Now that Minho relaxed he could actually feel Newt's ribs press against his stomach before slowly rising again. He was alive, and it brought unmeasurable joy to Minho. Now, if he would only wake up.

For a very long time, hours even, Minho lay there struggling to breathe while the heat of the fire slowly intensified. He tested his limbs to make sure he wasn't hurt, and although he couldn't move anything but his right arm and head, he figured he was one lucky bastard. A hard edge — it seemed to be the edge of the what-ever-it-was that lay on top of Newt — pressed against his thighs and it hurt really bad, but nothing seemed broken. Once all self-centred worry wore off, Minho's thoughts quickly settled on Thomas.

He tried calling his name a few times, but the struggle to draw satisfying breaths made it near impossible. Chills went down Minho's spine, sent new waves of crushing worry through him. He hoped for his dear life that Thomas was alive and unharmed, and if not unharmed then at least not dying. And he wished with all his heart that, if he was unconscious like Newt, that Thomas wasn't in danger of being swallowed by the fire that without a doubt was working its way closer and closer to where Minho was lying.

The fire was starting to become a major threat, he realised. The smoke irritated his eyes and throat, and the radiating heat on his right arm was growing more intense. He tried shuffling to his left away from the fire, but it only made breathing harder. Then he figured he might be able to lift the debris off Newt's back with his right arm, but it wouldn't budge even a little.

He was stuck there.

Fear crept up on him, infecting him like a disease. It had been lurking in the back of his mind ever since he'd witnessed the first bombs fall in the distance from Gally Carpenter's window. He had kept it at bay, focusing on simple tasks like sticking close to Newt and looking for his car keys when they found out they were gone. Now, as he was lying in the aftermath of yet another explosion, pinned down and unable to escape, Minho was truly terrified.

_I'm not gonna die here,_  he told himself over and over in his mind, with less confidence every time. He looked down on Newt, still deep in restless slumber, while tears pooled in his eyes. _We're not gonna die…_

He remembered the seconds before the explosion perfectly, those few moments after the bomb fell but before he hit his head and blacked out. He'd run toward the living room, his hand grasping Thomas's so hard it hurt, his other pulling at Newt's shirt after the blond had stopped beneath the stairs. He remembered the deafening sound and the force of the shockwave as it hurled him backwards. How Thomas's hand had slipped from his grasp.

Why was all this happening? Peace was the name of the game in The West, and there were hardly any military organisation left — it had all been disarmed. Yes, the borders were still heavily fortified, but that had more to do with disputes between The East and The North. Citizens of The West and The East could pass the borders as they wished, allowing people like Newt and his father to move here. Why were they being attacked like this? Terrorism? It sounded so crazy to Minho considering the number of planes he'd seen in the sky. And if it wasn't terrorists or extremists, then who was attacking them?

And what of his family? His parents had been at home when he left for the party, and he didn't know where his brother was. His sister lived on the countryside with her husband, between the city and the border. Had that area been bombed as well?

He couldn't hold it back anymore — the tears that wetted his eyes overflowed, flipping the switch on every emotion he had bottled up. He cried, sobbing uncontrollably although it felt like his chest was about to cave in. And all the while the fires closed in, slowly but surely, its crackling noises sounding like promises of death to his ears. Eventually Minho's strength gave way too, and he fell asleep clutching Newt's hair in his hand.

* * *

_He was trapped._

_Walls. Invisible, impenetrable. Darkness all around. He threw himself against the walls, beating at them with his fists. Hot and cold alternating._

_Can't breathe. Have to breathe. The walls closing in. Ceiling coming down, pressing. Have to escape. Breathe._

_"Can anyone hear me? Is anyone here? Hello?"_

_Calling, desperately. Screaming, hearing the sound but feeling like it's not coming from his throat. Smaller and smaller, hotter and hotter. Feeling cold inside._

_He dug his nails into the walls like they were made of jelly, but couldn't break through. Walls closing in, swallowing him. No air. His lungs shrunk, smaller and smaller. His ribcage closing in._

_Trapped._

_Dying._

_"Hello? Can you hear me? Over here!"_

_Calling, less desperately. Trapped, but not alone._

_There was somebody there with him._

* * *

Minho's eyes shot wide open and he drew a sharp, deep breath. It almost hurt the way his chest suddenly rose freely, and his muscles kept expanding although his lungs were already filled to the brim with air. A bright ball of light flashed before Minho's eyes, and then he heard the trampling of shoes next to his head.

"Hey, hey, easy there, boy! You're okay, you're okay." A man's voice, deep and brisk. "We're getting this thing off of you. You'll be alright."

Minho fell back again, hitting the back of his head quite hard. His vision was a blur of different shades of darkness, the blinding ball of light the only thing he could focus on. He thought he could see a face smudged in there in the corner of his eye, with a dark beard and deep eyes, but his mind could not pull the image together.

The man shouted something and the sounds of shoes and clothes and creaking wood all fought for Minho's attention. He breathed deep lungfuls of icy air, exhaling quickly so that he could fill his lungs again. It was relieving beyond comprehension.

Something like a hand came in under his neck, lifting it upward. Another set of fingers grabbed his right arm. He wanted to look, but his eyelids dropped and would not open again.

"Stay with me, boy! Don't fall asleep!"

Before he could do anything about it, the world fell away completely and he slept.


	4. Chapter 4

The usual stench of disinfectant could not by any means overpower the onslaught of smoke, blood and burning things that came with the rush of bomb victims. The hospital used what they had to try and cope with it all, putting the most badly injured people down wherever there was room — on desks, chairs put together, benches in the waiting area, mattresses and blankets on the floor. Thomas lay on the same emergency stretcher he had been brought in on, strapped down, unable to move. Not that he felt like moving. His skin felt like it had been ripped right off in patches. His back burned like fire and so did his entire left side. He didn't even want to breathe because it hurt so much to move his chest. They'd wrapped him in a blanket, but it didn't make much of a difference. He was freezing, miserable, hurting and wanted nothing more than to go to the bathroom.

"Please… Lord forgive us, please…"

The voice came from beside him, across the waiting area he was currently in. He shared the limited space with three other people, two of whom had not made much noise so far. The third was a woman in her mid-fifties, laying on her side on a bench. She clutched something like a chain in her hands, which were stained with dried blood. In the three or so dreadful hours since Thomas had been brought in she had done nothing but whimper and whisper pleas and prayers. He wanted to say something comforting, but came up with nothing. A selfish part of him even wanted to ask her to shut up as her words made him feel even more hopeless than he already did. But he would never do that. Whatever she was holding on to, he had something of his own in his hand. Something he refused to let go of.

The memory of Minho's hand in his right before the bomb fell.

There were no tears left to cry in Thomas. He was too tired to be worried — he was just… broken. He'd lost consciousness during the explosion, remembered nothing after the blast sent him flying. He did not know how long ago that was, did not know how long he'd been buried in the ruins of the Carpenters' home before they dug him out. He'd woken up while they carried him out of the ambulance and wheeled him here, not even stopping to examine his wounds or give him anything against the pain.

"Please, let my son's soul be blessed and restful in heaven," the woman continued, for the fourth time.

Thomas closed his eyes, not even caring about the wound on his left eye anymore. _Please, let my friends still be alive. Let Newt be alive. Please, please, let Minho be alive…_

He fell asleep a few times, only to wake up when the pain in his side flared up again. He'd stopped listening to the background noises, which had become a constant mix of crying, pained grunts and people talking in more or less agitated voices about more or less horrible subjects. Even the woman on the bench had fallen silent. All in all, there seemed to be a uneasy night coming for them all.

A couple of civilian nurses came in and handed out soda cans, chocolate bars and little sandwiches — they looked to come directly from the hospital cafeteria. The solemn look on their faces spoke of all the things they'd seen while walking around the hospital giving food out. They helped remove Thomas's straps so that he could sit up, but didn't wait to make sure he managed it. It turned out to be the most strenuous achievement of his life when Thomas finally got an elbow underneath him and could lift his torso into an upright position. He bit his tongue not to cry out loud, and tears wetted his eyes as the pain shot up his spine. He hadn't realised just how badly wounded he was until he lifted his shirt and saw that his entire left side was covered by a huge, purple and green bruise. It stretched toward his back beyond what he could see. There was blood too, he could feel it having dried on his back and neck.

Thomas hungrily devoured the food he'd been given, drank the entire soda can in one sweep. He felt surprisingly much better with food in his stomach although the meal was quite small. He even shared a smile with one of his other room mates, a young man with both legs hastily bandaged to splints.

It took all his self-control and determination to get off the stretcher and, with the blanket wrapped around his shoulders, stagger to the nearest restroom. He was happy to find that it was not far at all, and the line was short. He'd brought the empty soda can and filled it with water when washing his hands of blood and dirt. Once he got back to the waiting area he felt okay. Not good, but okay.

He got back on the stretcher, found the least painful position and closed his eyes. He did not sleep, but he tried his best to enjoy the sombre silence that had filled the hospital. He hoped that it was over, and that once the worst pain was gone he could find his friends. Then he'd leave the city and find his mother.

A few hours later, a nurse came into the room with a trolley. On it were rolls of bandages, disinfectant, syringes, wet wipes and various first aid material. She checked up on them one by one, speaking calmly and always with a sad but encouraging smile. Explaining as if to children that due to the power outage and the many new patients, they could not take them in for surgery or x-ray. Thomas hadn't realised until she said power-outage that there were actually lights on in the hospital, although not all of them.

"Why do we have power?" he asked the nurse hoarsely when it was his turn for check-up.

"The hospital has it's own back-up generator for… emergencies like this," she said, her smile fading a little. Thomas suddenly knew a thousand more questions he wanted to ask, but he settled for the one.

"Wha- what's it like?" Thomas asked, stopping the nurse in her work. "Out there. What is going on?"

She hesitated, looking down as if unwilling to answer, then removed a strand of black hair from her face. "I don't know," she said shortly. Thomas was about to push it, but she continued. "I saw the planes. They had the sigil of The East on them. No one I've spoken to can understand why they would do something like this. It's… it's an act of war."

With that, she fell silent, and Thomas let her be. She lifted his shirt and cleaned up the wounds on his back as best she could, then dressed them. She had the shard of glass removed from his eye, hesitating on whether it needed stitching but deciding to go with a large band-aid instead. Thomas thanked her, and was given a slightly less sad smile in return before she went away.

Just before she exited the room, however, she stopped. "At least they didn't bomb the hospital. I guess we have that much to be thankful for." Then she was gone.

Thomas wanted to go out, wander the hospital to see if he could find his friends, but his trek to the bathroom had drained his energy. He lay on the stretcher, staring up into the ceiling, battling the images of burning houses and mangled bodies that attacked his brain.

"Thomas!"

Thomas shot up so fast his stretcher nearly toppled over and new pain stabbed him through the back like a sword. But he hadn't misheard — it was Minho standing there in the doorway, all black hair and swollen eyes and sweat-soaked, dust-covered clothes.

Thomas had never been so happy to see anyone in his life.

"Thomas, you ugly trash," Minho said with a bright smile and ran over.

Thomas opened his arms to let Minho in, embraced the asian boy as hard as he could. He buried his face in the other boy's shirt, even biting down on the fabric when Minho's strong arms put pressure on his injured back.

"Minho," he whispered into the boy's neck. "I thought… I mean, I hoped you…"

When Minho's arms let go, Thomas held on for just a split second longer, pressing his friend's chest a little harder to his own before pulling away. They looked at each other, drank in the other's well-being, shuddering inside at the other possibility.

Minho's lips twitched like he wanted to say something, his gaze dropping. Thomas said it for him. "Newt."

"He's okay," Minho assured him quickly, but his deep, dark eyes told a different story. "Alive, anyway."

Thomas didn't need to tell him — Minho was already heading for the door again. Thomas heaved himself off the stretcher, flinching in pain, and followed his friend as best he could. Minho slowed down when he realised that Thomas could hardly walk, letting the injured boy lean on his shoulder as they made their way through the corridors of the hospital. At one point they passed another, bigger waiting area, with windows covering the entire far wall. Thomas stopped abruptly for a second, his eyes growing larger and his heart heavier at the sight. It was still dark out, with just the slightest hint of dawn colouring the distance, but the sky was lit up by something different entirely. Fire. It still blazed with a ferocious intensity, licking the skeletons of skyscrapers in the central parts of the city. The city itself was layer upon layer of black silhouettes, reflecting the light show of blue and red flashers of a hundred fire trucks, ambulances and police cars.

It felt like watching a movie, Thomas thought. Minho pulled him along gently.

They turned a corner and Minho directed them into a room right beside the big waiting area. The room was small and shared by six beds separated with blue plastic curtains. People sat on the edges of the beds and on chairs, holding the hands of injured loved ones. Several pairs of eyes turned in their direction when Minho and Thomas entered, each pair reflecting the same dread that filled the boys' hearts. Minho went to a bed in the far corner and pulled the curtain aside to let Thomas in.

If Minho hadn't told him so earlier, Thomas would've never believed that Newt was alive.

The blond lay outstretched on the bed, his legs and arms flat and straight like a doll's. His head rested on a white pillow, an equally white cover draped over his lower body, and an oxygen mask covered his face. His skin did nothing to contrast the whiteness of the hospital beddings — he was as pale and grey as porcelain. The only color came in the form of dried blood on his face running in lines from a wound dressed in bandages, with deep cuts and scratches to match all over.

Minho took the chair beside the bed, resting his elbows on the edge, rubbing his swollen eyes tiredly.

"When they rescued me from the rubble I blacked out," Minho explained. "Woke up two– three hours ago, found him like this. Haven't gotten hold of a doctor to tell me what's wrong with him. He won't wake up no matter what I do."

At a complete lack of words, Thomas did the only thing that came to mind — he staggered over to Minho and put a hand on his shoulder. It hurt him more than words could describe to see Newt in this condition, and it killed him to see Minho this heart-broken.

Something like a sob escaped Minho's throat, but his voice sounded almost angry. "I woke up after the explosion and he was laying on top of me. We were pinned down a-and there was a fire and… I thought he was dead. I really believed that he was dead, Thomas."

A new form of pain gripped Thomas's body, a mental one. He couldn't imagine it — being awake but unable to move or help Newt. Images of what he'd seen before he ran for Shelby Quarters flooded him again, the memory of Minho's home burning—

 _He doesn't know,_ Thomas realised. _I haven't told him yet._

"Minho," he began, his voice already cracking. "Your…" _I can't do it._

Minho glanced at him without turning his head. "What?"

Thomas swallowed. He had to tell him. "When the bombs fell… one of them hit right by your house. I saw it. It was… burning, and your car…"

His gaze had fallen to the floor, the words getting stuck in his throat, but Minho was staring at him with full concentration now, slowly rising from the chair. Suddenly the boy wasn't broken and tired anymore — he looked about ready to explode.

"What are you saying? Thomas?"

"I'm saying… I don't know," he admitted. "Was there anyone..?"

"My parents were in that house," he whispered. The next few words came out in a shout. "Did you see them!?"

Minho hadn't even realised what he was doing until Thomas whimpered in pain. He'd gripped the boy's shoulders tight and was pressing them together. A chilly silence had befallen the room as its inhabitants tried their best not to notice the sudden commotion. Minho let go, his black eyes still locked with Thomas's toffee brown ones.

"I have to find them," Minho said, once more in a low voice.

"I'll go with you," Thomas offered, but Minho shook his head.

"Stay with Newt. He needs…" He glanced over Thomas's shoulder at Newt's unconscious form. "… _someone_ here."

But Thomas would have none of it. "No way I'm letting you go out there alone." He focused all of his determination into his eyes, willing Minho to let him come.

Minho only sighed. "You're hurt. You can hardly walk."

"I'll manage," Thomas countered quickly. "Look, this place is as safe as it's gonna get. You're not going alone."

Minho didn't have time to argue and he knew it. There was desperation in the frown that had settled on his otherwise smooth, tanned face. Then his gaze fell away again, and he brought up his hand. When he extended his fingers, Thomas saw that he was holding a familiar set of keys. It was the little Ford logo badge and the characteristic photo of a blond, smiling lady that made Thomas certain they belonged to Newt.

"We're not far from Shelby Quarters," Minho said, deep in thought. "It's on the way anyway. If it's still there, we'll take the car."

Thomas nodded. A sudden fear was grasping at him, an unwillingness to leave the hospital. He'd ran the streets during the air raids, been at risk of dying multiple times. Who knew what the city looked like, or if it was safe to be outside? What if the attack wasn't over? He doubted the decisions they were making. But when they said goodbye to the unresponsive Newt and Minho headed for the hallway, Thomas followed. A painful, slow stagger, but he followed.

He would always follow Minho, come whatever.


	5. Chapter 5

Getting out of the hospital was no trouble at all. The reception was empty and people came and went as they pleased. No one was registered or checked out, and Thomas understood why. Where chaos reigned, order was the first thing to go up in flames.

He did his best to keep the pace Minho wanted to have, but it was impossible with his injured back. Thomas forced himself to remember that Minho was a track runner, one who could probably make it to Arnagard where they lived in one third of the time it would take with Thomas in tow.

 _Maybe I should go back inside_ , he thought. He didn't want to, but he was holding Minho back.

"Come here," Minho said as if on queue and offered Thomas his shoulder to lean on. When he did, walking became a little easier.

They didn't get very far. The small parking lot in front of the E.R visitor's entrance was packed with cars, civilian and police, light bars flashing and people buzzing around everywhere. Ambulances came and went continuously, with people carrying wounded in their arms and pushing wheelchairs into the hospital. By the time the boys realised they should try to slip through somewhere unnoticed they had already been spotted.

A middle-aged, tall woman came up to them, a flashlight under her arm and a notebook in the other. She wasn't with the police, but wore a reflective vest with _Volunteer_ written across the front. "Can you tell me your names, please?"

"Wha–? Minho Hung Yun," Minho said impatiently. "That's with a Y."

The woman wrote the name down in her notebook. "Age and address?"

"We don't really have time for this," Minho pushed, sounding more and more irritated by the second.

"Please," the woman said then, a softness in her tone. "With the networks all down we're trying to keep track of as many survivors as possible."

The way she said the word _survivors_ made Thomas's stomach turn. Almost as if the number of deaths after the attacks exceeded the number of survivors. He couldn't imagine it being so bad. But looking at the backdrop of orange glow and smoke clouds made him doubt.

"Eighteen, 47 Ivy Road, Arnagard."

The woman threw the information down in her notes, then nodded for Thomas to speak. "Thomas Stephens, 42 Ivy Road, Arnagard, same as him. I'm also eighteen."

"Can you confirm, with absolute certainty, any other survivors you know?"

Minho didn't even hesitate. "Isaac Newton. He's nineteen, lives in Hoshport. Arch's Crossing 5A."

Thomas expected the woman to comment on Newt's full name, as everybody always did, but she didn't even seem to react. She scribbled it all down underneath Thomas's address, then looked up questioningly. To Thomas's great regret he couldn't think of a single other person he knew to be alive. Any of the neighbours he'd seen by his house after the first bomb fell could have fallen victim to the other air raids. He hadn't seen any of his school mates since before the Carpenter's home was bombed.

"Have you any other Hung Yun's on that list?" Minho asked.

The woman shook her head, flipping a page on her notepad. "I'm sorry, I've only been here a couple of minutes. I can't see anyone else named Stephens either– where are you going?"

Minho had pushed past the volunteer, heading away from the hospital, when she turned after him and grabbed his arm. Minho's reaction was violent — he swatted the woman's hand away so hard she dropped her flashlight. She gave him a hard look as he squatted down to pick it up, then flashed it in their faces on purpose as she got up.

"Look, I may not know what's going on, but we're not supposed to let you leave. It's dangerous out the–"

"Try to stop me and I will start throwing punches," Minho hissed sharply, getting up in the volunteer's face as he spoke. "We both know you have more important stuff to do."

"I have to insist you remain here where it's safe," the woman tried again, but Thomas could see in her body language that she was not going to fight them over it.

"No," Minho replied curtly, then moved along with Thomas by the arm.

No one else seemed to have the time to care about them as they hurried by. Once they were past the blockade, Minho looked Thomas dead in the eye.

"You think you're good to run for a while?" The way he said it made it clear to Thomas that nothing but the hard-edged truth would do from now on. Thomas felt his body, scanned it with his senses quickly. Ever since he'd gotten off that stretcher his mobility had increased rapidly. It would hurt, but he believed he could make it. For a while.

He nodded, as assuringly as possible. He braced himself for the strain, then took off from the parking lot in a steady jog. Yes, it hurt, but he pushed himself. As long as he kept his back slightly curved and didn't move his shoulders too much, he was good to go. Minho stayed close by his side, seemingly wanting to go faster but loyalty made his keep Thomas's pace. He seemed satisfied as long as they were moving, anyway.

* * *

The city was in ruins.

Thomas got used to it so fast that he stopped feeling that sting of unrealism and fear every time they came across a crater or a fire or a body. Disgust and sadness became constant. But it was clear that the third raid that had buried them underneath the rubble of the Carpenters' house hadn't been the last one. As Minho and Thomas slowly but surely made their way back to Shelby Quarters, they found that at least half of the city had been levelled with the ground. However, the area around the hospital had been left untouched. It made Thomas think that the attack was not an inhuman as it could have been — if they wanted them absolutely helpless, then the hospital would be an essential target.

Minho had come up with the brilliant idea to hold their shirts up over their mouths and noses to keep from breathing in too much of the smoke that lay heavy everywhere. They saw several people doing the same thing as they searched through the remains of destroyed houses and marched in groups in the direction of the hospital. Wherever they went there were bodies lined up in the streets, covered with sheets and blankets and even clothes. Search-and-rescue seemed to be top priority everywhere, for civilian and police alike. But there was so much destruction that most did not seem to know where to begin. The injured were transported to the hospital in any way possible. Many seemed to have given up on driving as almost every road was blocked by rubble or the carcasses of cars burned down by the fire bombs. Thomas wondered if it really was worth it to try and find Newt's car — he imagined it a blackened shell covered in ashes.

He wasn't surprised to find that to be exactly the case when they finally turned the corner onto Aster Main where the big, white Carpenter home had once stood. They stopped, Thomas doubling over in the middle of the street trying to catch his breath while Minho went on to take a closer look at the ruins of the house.

"This is sick," he said, more to himself than to Thomas. "Just so sick."

They were alone — anyone who had been there to help get them out had left long ago. Every single house was completely or partially demolished, the flames put out by the water that now covered the street. Thomas saw something on the opposite side — several red-and-white sheets laid out on the pavement just behind the burnt piece of metal that had once been Newt's car. He sidled closer and almost hurled when he realised what they were.

"Minho," he croaked, and the boy jogged up beside him.

Bodies. A dozen of them, at least. Blood had soaked the white fabric — the red that Thomas had seen — and coloured the dirty water on the ground. Even without lifting the sheets Thomas knew that some of them were missing limbs. The closest body, a girl judging by the curves on the chest, seemed to end beneath the pelvis.

To Thomas's disgust, Minho crouched down by one of the other bodies and gently pulled the sheet back from the face. Thomas expected worse, but the boy underneath it was not as mutilated as the girl beside him. His skin matched the ashes littering the sidewalk, a clear contrast to the shiny tan Thomas remembered the boy to have had. Because he knew this kid, and it made his stomach turn.

"Oh my god, it's Charlie Winston."

Minho nodded, his face contorted in something between grief and nausea. He bowed his head, placed a hand on the boy's chest, then pulled the sheet back over Winston's face and stood up.

"We have to go."

Thomas did not object. Part of him wanted to see who the other bodies were, but more than anything he wanted to put as much distance between himself and all this unjustifiable death as possible. With that as his motivation, Thomas broke into the same stumbling, painful jog as before, back the way he'd come when he'd first been looking for Minho and Newt.

* * *

It took them little more than forty minutes to get to Arnagard. Once they reached the beginning of Ivy road, Minho's desperation grew too loud to ignore. He raced ahead of Thomas, climbing over debris blocking his way, all in an effort to get to his home as fast as humanly possible. Thomas slowed down to a walk, looking at each demolished house in turn, remembering his homeless neighbours and counting the cloth-covered bodies along the way that thankfully didn't number as many as back in Shelby Quarters. He imagined that since the first bomb had dropped here quite early, many had been given the chance to leave before the next wave struck. That, or they just hadn't been dug out of the rubble just yet. But no matter what he saw on the way, nothing prepared him for when he laid eyes on number 42 Ivy Road.

There was nothing left of his childhood home.

The walls were crumbled, blasted to bits and spread across the garden, the backyard, the driveway. It was all a big scrapheap of splintered wood, burnt plaster and countless irreplaceable family trinkets buried in the aftermath of war. Thomas was about to fall to his knees, catching himself on the door of a turned-over car sitting in the middle of the road. He eased closer to the remains of the house, that feeling of complete disbelief seeping through his every pore once again.

In the midst of the emotional chaos going through his head, one thought rang truer and clearer than any other. _My mother was not here. She's far away, safe and worried to death about me. But she's alive and I'm alive._

He couldn't be one hundred percent certain, though. But he couldn't allow such thoughts to ravage him right now. When he turned around and peered down the road he saw Minho sitting on the sidewalk, and he knew that it was his turn to be the strong one. For Thomas's house may have been destroyed, but Minho's was just gone. Reduced to charcoal and ashes, a black stain beside the crater left by the first fire bomb. Smoke still rose from the remnants, and in some places little fires still glowed tauntingly. No one had been able to put out the fire like back at the Carpenters'.

Thomas came up beside Minho, who was staring blankly at a spot in midair, knees to his chest and hands on his head. There were no tears in his eyes, and the redness of rage that had fuelled his so far was gone, replaced by a deathlike pallor. Thomas sat down beside his friend in silence, biting down on his lip as to not grunt in pain when his back complained. Neither of them said anything for a long while, letting the chilly October morning steal what was left of their warmth. Minho still couldn't look away from his burned-down home, while Thomas observed the rising sun hopelessly trying to shed some light on the horrible things that had gone down this night.

Eventually, Minho spoke up. "That's their car over there." He pointed to the blackened framework sticking up from a pile of debris. "Which means they were here."

"The first bomb fell somewhere near here, the second I heard was over there," Thomas said in a half-whisper, nodding to the crater that had replaced Minho's closest neighbour's house. "When I came out here your house was already on fire."

Minho closed his eyes hard, the emotional pain visible on his face, then relaxed again. "They were here," he said again, complete and utter defeat hiding beneath every word. "They were here, and… Man, I can't. I can't… My brother. I don't know where he… is, hi-his car isn't here…"

For every word that came out of his mouth, Minho feel into a deeper, more frantic despair. He chocked up, stuttering and spitting and sobbing. Tears rolled freely down his now flushed face now, seemingly with no end. Thomas watched Minho break down, his own heart breaking too. When the first tear escaped his eye, Thomas shifted closer to Minho and pulled the hysterical boy into his arms. He held Minho by the back of his head, letting one hand rest in the ruffled, black hair while the other caressed his back. Minho wrapped his own arms loosely around Thomas's shoulders, burying his face in his dirty, smokey shirt.

They sat like that for a while, then Minho turned around so that they sat side by side, so close that their thighs touched and Minho could still rest his head on Thomas's shoulder. Thomas held his arm up around Minho's broad shoulder although the position hurt his back. The tears ran out for both of them, and still they said nothing.

Eventually Thomas's ears grew weary of the silence and started fishing for anything to listen to. The sounds of sirens blaring far away, the crackle of fire slowly dying out in front of him, the mismatch of nature sounds that sounded so awfully ordinary that Thomas figured he'd never heard greater lies in his life. The faint, chilly breeze rustling through the ashes like they were leaves and…

… drums beating? It really sounded like it — a faint, distant booming sound, fast and rhythmic and approaching quickly.

Once again, Minho's reaction was faster. "Get down!"

Thomas knew instantly what he was hearing — a helicopter. Adrenalin kicked in in a matter of nanoseconds, sending Thomas to the ground. But Minho's actions contradicted his words. He grabbed Thomas by both shoulders and pulled him up, shoving him in front of him out onto the street. They ran for the nearest car, jumping and climbing over the rubble to get there. Minho jumped in first, over the hood and through the shattered windscreen, not bothering to try any of the doors. He helped Thomas get inside, then both boys squeezed down in front of the driver's and passenger seats. They made themselves as small as they possible could and waited.

The sound grew louder, the beating of the propeller blades matching the heartbeats of Thomas and Minho. They listened, expecting explosions to follow the helicopter's flyby, but none came. Several more rhythmic beats followed the first one — there were more than one helicopter, then. Thomas craned his neck to see, shifting his position a little as it hurt his injured back something terrible. Minho put a finger to his lips, telling Thomas to wait, but still nothing happened.

Then Thomas saw something through the window behind Minho. Something similar to snowflakes, only much, much larger and shifting in white and grey, was falling from the sky. So many of them, filling the air before all falling to the ground. One of the them flying through the broken windscreen, softly landing on Minho's leg. It was a paper, an ordinary, white paper.

The sounds of the helicopters reached a crescendo, then faded away as they flew by, leaving nothing but the papers to show that they'd ever been there. Not until the sounds were completely gone did Thomas dare to move again.

Minho stared wide-eyed at his friend, more confused than ever. He slowly took the paper and held it up, then read what was written on it out loud.

 

> _To the citizens of Hallstay._
> 
> _Your government has forsaken you. In favour for a peace treaty with our common enemy The South, that includes opening the borders and dismantling the protection our two countries set up to keep said enemy at bay, The West has put themselves in a position that leaves us with no other choice but to declare that the SANAF [Signed Agreement of No Armed Forces] is no longer valid and therefor not an active practice._
> 
> _In an attempt to avoid conflict that could result in collateral damage, I, the residing President Simone Raphia of The East, with Council, put forth a renewal of the SANAF peace treaty to your government officials. This reformed agreement was turned down and actions to enforce the peace treaty with The South were taken by your Minister of State Julay Arkah and Vice-minister Harrod Hensley. As a result of this, we found ourselves with no other choice but to take drastic action to ensure that a devastating war would not arise between The East, The South and The West._
> 
> _Citizens of Hallstay, your city and the neighbouring cities of Carn and Ilestead have been surrounded by our forces and any communication with the outside world has been cut off. You are currently under siege, but you have my most sincere promise that you are in no danger. You will join with us in The East and be granted full pardon from the actions of your government and full citizenship in the cities we plan to rebuild, with all the rights of a born Easterner._
> 
> _We will transport food, clean water, medical supplies and clothes and set up temporary homes in the areas marked on the map below. You will be registered upon arrival to the Safe Zones. Failure to travel to your nearest Safe Zone or to avoid registration will be seen as treachery and is hereby punishable by death according to Eastern Law. Your government has been given seventy-two [72] hours to accept the new terms of the reformed SANAF, or further repercussive actions will be taken._
> 
> _Signed_  
>  President Simone Raphia  
>  Vice-president Cory DeMegane  
>  The Council of Blue Hall

Minho stared at the paper in complete shock, as if afraid that it would bite him if he blinked. Thomas remained in complete silence, not knowing what part of the ominous letter scared him the most — the declaration of war, the fact that it said that their own country was at fault, that they'd be hunted and killed if they didn't register or the fact that the letter said that Ilestead had been attacked, too.

His mother worked in Ilestead. His heart shuddered, ice spreading through his veins at the thought.

"We have to get back to Newt," Minho said suddenly. Thomas only nodded.


	6. Chapter 6

Newt was conscious, but it took hours for his head to clear up enough to count as awake. He lay completely still, physically unable to open his eyes or move anything more than his chest to force air in and out. Absolutely everything ached, but his head hurt enough for his entire body. Pulsating pressure came and went, as if someone heavy was constantly stepping on and off his forehead. The only positive thing was that he knew for sure that he was alive.

Without moving, Newt started to sense his surroundings. There were voices speaking. Muffled, incoherent voices of many different people. Other sounds broke through too, each equally impossible for him to recognise. He lay on his back on something soft, like a tacky, plasticky surface. He was quite warm and cozy. The sensation of the safety one would feel in their own bed, hidden from imaginary monsters underneath the cover, filled his body, but his heart did not agree. The pain kept making itself known in waves. Anxiety chewed away at his subconscious, trying to reach the surface.

Bit by bit his thoughts came together like a puzzle. Something was wrong — terribly, terribly wrong.

 _Open your eyes_ , he ordered himself. He felt his muscles moving, but no light came. _Wake up!_

His mind floated in a black void where images, sounds and sensations flew around wildly. He heard Minho's voice yell and crack. Saw Tommy's deep-brown eyes, frantic and filled with the most heartbreaking horror. Smelled smoke and toxin. The words conflict, damage, peace and choice echoed from somewhere.

No, not words. Sentences. _Take drastic action to ensure that… your city and the neighbouring cities of Carn and… you are currently under siege… siege. Currently under siege._

Suddenly, Newt's eyes just opened. He woke up so fast it made him dizzy, but he remained completely still. Every one of his senses came back to him like a flood. He was staring into a white ceiling far above, it reeked of smoke and filth, and there was a male voice talking as if through speakers.

"… food, clean water, medical supplies and clothes and set up temporary homes in the areas marked on the map below. You will be registered upon arrival to the Safe Zones. Failure to travel to your nearest Safe Zone or to avoid registration will be seen as treachery and is hereby punishable by death according to Eastern Law. Your government has been given seventy-two hours to accept the new terms of the reformed SANAF, or further repercussive actions will be taken."

The voice paused, breathed out in a shudder. Nothing stirred in the silence. "That's what the papers says. It says the same on every one, signed by the President of the East. Now, please, I need everyone to remain calm and don't panic. Don't leave the hospital for any reason. Nurses will continue to help as many as possible, and I will notify you the minute we have any new information. Until then, just try to stay calm."

There was a clicking sound and the voice vanished. It was quiet for a moment, then the people in the same room as Newt started chattering in hushed voices.

Newt couldn't understand a word off of that paper, but many other things came back to him. The party at Ruth and Gally Carpenter's. The power outage and everyone's cell reception dying. The planes dropping bombs that set the city on fire. He remembered trying to find his car keys when Thomas came running, bleeding and scared out of his wits. Newt's heart contracted at the thought of his Tommy like that. Then they found Minho and they tried to run. After that he couldn't remember anything. He knew, though. He'd heard the sound of the bomb falling toward the house right before it hit.

 _Tommy and Minho. Are they even–_ He didn't allow himself to finish that sentence. He closed his eyes again, forcing himself to picture his friends unharmed and smiling. They were alive, and Newt was going to find them.

He knew even before he moved that what he was about to attempt was bad, if not impossible. But he did it anyway, hunching his back to lift his torso from the bed and get his elbows in underneath him. Spears of pain when through his right shoulder and his head spun like crazy, but he pushed through it. Biting down on his tongue and closing his eyes hard, Newt inched himself into a sitting position and leaned against the wall behind him. His body protested, but for some reason the worst of the pain seemed to radiate from the area around his left knee. He opened his eyes, blinking away the stars that swam in his field of vision, and looked down at his legs. Although hidden beneath the cover, both legs looked fine. Everything below the knees seemed properly attached and whole. Then he slowly leaned forward to pull the cover aside, and his view of the situation changed radically.

There was a thin metal rod sticking out of his knee.

Newt almost hurled, the pain intensifying tenfold just from knowing about its source. Someone had wrapped bandages tightly around the wound and the rod to keep it from moving. Blood had long since soaked the white fabric and bled through onto the bedsheets. The rod itself was maybe a centimetre in diameter and bent in such a way that it was impossible to pull out. Newt reached for it, unbelieving that something like that could be sitting inside his body, but the second he touched it he flinched back and cried out.

Tears sprang to his eyes, and he made no effort to try and stop them. He was angry, worried beyond his own understanding, terrified and lost. He wanted to hug someone, or beat something to splinters. But more than anything he wanted to find his friends. And his father.

Newt looked around the room, filled to the brim with people sitting on the floor and on the foots of beds. Injured men, women and children of all ages. No one was paying any attention to him, and no one was familiar.

Preparing his body for the agony to come, Newt grabbed the edge of the medical bed and slid his right leg off the edge. Then he bit down again, almost drawing blood on the inside of his lower lip. Using his left arm to assist, Newt began moving his injured left leg off the bed. A little bit at the time, in quick bursts of adrenalin. The pain was immense, but not unbearable. Once the foot slid off the edge of the bed, the worst pain exploded. He couldn't bend his knee, but he couldn't hold it up either. Instinct made him jump off the bed and stand on his right leg so that the left knee did not have to bend.

He almost toppled over. His insides rebelled and sent the contents of his stomach rushing up his oesophagus, but nothing came out. He dry-heaved, leaning against the wall as he put any remaining energy into his one good leg. He couldn't fall now, or he would never get back up.

"Woah, slowly," a female voice told him, then an arm wrapped around his shoulders.

Newt turned to look although the room spun more with every movement. It was a girl, much younger than him, with flushed cheeks and shoulder-length locks to match the redness. She was a mess, dirty and sweaty but otherwise unscathed. She let Newt lean on her as he regained his composure.

"Holy shit," she gasped, having seen the rod sticking out of his knee. "You really shouldn't walk on that."

Newt shook his head, drawing slow breaths. "My friends. I have to find them."

"There was an asian kid," the girl said, nodding. "He was here a while ago. I don't know where he went."

Newt's heart skipped a beat at the sudden confirmation. Minho was alive! He broke out in a smile, too happy to speak. But where thought of Minho were, Thomas soon followed in Newt's mind.

"Was there someone else? Dark hair, dark eyes. Moles all over."

The red-haired girl shook her head doubtfully, her eyebrows furrowed. "Seen no one like that. There was the asian boy, that's all I've seen."

_You're okay, Tommy. You're alive. You have to be._

"You okay?" the girl said suddenly, gripping his arm tighter.

Newt realised he had cringed under the weight of not knowing. There was an iron taste in his mouth from having chewed at his lower lip. The knee wound hurt something awful, but he nodded to the girl. "A crutch," he said through gritted teeth. "I have to go."

"Uh, no no…" But Newt was already leaving the girl behind.

Using the edges of chairs and beds to hold himself upright, he literally dragged his injured leg behind him. He navigated through the crowded room until he reached the door, then hopped along the wall of the corridor as best he could. Holy hell, it hurt so bad, but he kept going. Kept hopping on his good leg until he found what he was looking for — a lone crutch. It stood beside the makeshift bed of an elderly man, the man's apparent wife sleeping on the floor beside it. Any other day, Newt would have never even thought of doing what he did now, but he was desperate. He slithered past the woman on the floor, trying his best not to wake either of them, and snatched the crutch for himself. With it, moving became slightly easier.

The hospital was overflowing with people laying on beds and sitting or resting on the floors. An uneasy calmness had fallen over them all, with conversations held in whispers and most either sleeping of pretending to sleep. Newt could only guess how long he'd been out of it, but he felt inexplicably rested. But now that he moved through the hallways of the hospital, searching through every room on every floor for any sign of Minho and Thomas, the full blow of what had happened hit him. He saw it in every open wound and torn clothing, in the eyes of every person he walked by and through the windows that overlooked the city.

Life as he'd known it was over. His own country had made sure of that.

Newt couldn't explain why it hurt so bad, but it did. The image of the Eastern seal painted on the wings of the bomber planes was seared onto the insides of his eyelids. The words he'd heard but could not understand — Currently under siege and Signed by the president of The East — echoed mercilessly in his head. It was his country, the land he'd always had the wish to return to someday, the place he'd been born and raised and forced to leave. They had destroyed an entire city, more than one, probably killing countless people in the process, and for what reason? Newt was certain he'd never live to feel a worse betrayal.

More painful still was the hopelessness that gnawed at his heart, because he couldn't find his friends. It had taken him so long that the smoke-embedded sun was now completely visible beyond the skyline of the city, but Newt had searched the entire hospital. Thomas was not here, and Minho must have left like the red-haired girl had said. Miserable and weak from a growing hunger, Newt sank to the floor in a corner of the X-Ray department. He didn't want to, but what could he do? His leg hurt so much he was afraid he'd never walk again if he kept pushing himself, and his head spun like a runaway rollercoaster.

So he sat there, with no tears to cry and hope bleeding from his heart. Looked through windows at the smoke rising endlessly from the city outside, listening to the whispers of people around him.

"There will be battles. We have to defend ourselves. Bring in the military."

"What military? Whatever defences we have are at the border, and that obviously did not help."

Newt stopped listening after a while. He suddenly felt guilty for being a born Easterner, an outsider, a perpetrator in this place of victims.

 _If Tommy was here he'd tell me that wasn't true_. That hurt Newt even more.

As the time passed ever so slowly with little change, a noise new to him faded in from a distance. Rhythmic, beating.

The propellers of helicopters.

Newt was ready to get up an run even with a bad leg, his heartbeat rising with each beat of the helicopters' blades. But to his great surprise, no one else moved. In fact, the exact opposite happened — everyone froze where they were, conversations dying out as the noise reached their ears, eyes looking up to the ceiling as if they could see through it. The sound intensified, got closer.

Then, the most unexpected thing happened. A voice, rough and male, sounded from all around the hospital through speakers, so loud it made the windows vibrate and people put their hands over their ears.

"Remain calm. We are with East LEDA, Law Enforcement and Defence Agency, and this area is being secured and enclosed as Safe Zone 2. Registration will begin shortly. Resistance is futile and punishable. Remain where you are until registration is complete. We will thereafter start passing out food rations and supplies. I repeat, remain calm…"

Newt couldn't believe what he was hearing. It sounded even weirder since the man spoke in a deep Eastern accent, a tongue well known to Newt. Had he not known better, it could as well have been his own father speaking.

Despite the ominous message being repeated through the deafening speakers, the people sharing Newt's hallway surprised him with their calmness. He surprised himself. Because as minutes ticked on by the dozen and became hours, and the skies filled up with even more planes and helicopters, and parades of cars could be heard driving around the hospital, and a tumult of raised voices and yelling came from all around them, Newt remained in the exact spot he had sunk down in. He did not dare move, or didn't have the strength to. It didn't matter why, because it was too late to do anything.

They came in dark blue, armoured jumpsuits, weapons in hand. Big and intimidating. Woman or man — no one could tell underneath the tight-fitting helmets and tinted visors. Newt knew the likes of them, remembered them patrolling his birth city in The East once in a while. Military police, or Mice, as they'd been dubbed by the youngsters roaming the streets after dark.

They went in pairs, their very presence creating a path through the overfilled hospital hallways. They grabbed person after person, asking them the same question, tapping answers onto touch pads, then holding a small, metallic device to their wrists. The machine made a sizzling noise, and most retracted their arms in apparent discomfort immediately.

One man across the hallway from Newt was holding the hand of a woman so tightly they both trembled. The Mice came up to him, towering over his huddled form on the floor, and asked him the same question.

"What is your full name and country of birth?"

"Hannes Esquibel," the man said, too loudly to conceal his fright. "I… I was born here."

One of the Mice squatted down and reached for Hannes' arm, ready to push the sizzling device to his skin. But the woman sitting next to him was quicker, swatting away the soldier's hand and pulling Hannes' extended arm back toward her own chest.

"You can't do this. This is discriminating and inhuman! You can't brand us like animals!" she barked at the Mice, almost sending them back on their heels.

Almost. The soldier who had had his hand knocked away was on his feet in the blink of an eye, aiming his slick, black gun at the woman's face. Several people around the scene gasped and moved away from the scene, and the woman curled up to Hannes' shoulder with a shriek. But no shot was fired. The soldier's shorter colleague put a hand on the gun and lowered it for him, looking him dead in the eye through the dark visor. "No."

"Resistant and punishable," the gun-wielding Mice grunted. "Those are our words."

"She ain't resisting," the shorter soldier said coldly, and her gaze shifted back to the woman on the floor.

With tears pooling in both of their eyes, Hannes allowed himself to be branded by the sizzling machine and the woman extended her shivering arm. "Janine Esquibel. I'm also born here."

And so on the Eastern soldiers went, one by one registering the victims of the bomb attack and burning little number series on their wrists. No one else tried to speak up, but Newt saw several people giving the soldiers spiteful looks, glaring at their backs with more hatred than he'd ever thought possible.

The soldier pair, the same that had handled the Esquibel couple, reached Newt's corner and stood like two thick tree trunks on either side of his extended, injured leg.

"Full name and place of birth, please," the female, shorter soldier demanded.

Newt had thought up until now, watching them go through the others, that he had to do something. He had to stand up to these people. But now that their attention was directed at him, he couldn't muster the strength to do anything but comply.

"Isaac Julian Newton, born in—" He hesitated, new waves of guilt rushing him. "Born in The East, in Revishire."

Newt began to hold up his arm, but he sensed that something in the aura had changed. Instead of immediately branding him and moving on to the next, the two soldiers shared a quick glance and a nod. Then the taller male one put away the little machine, and instead held out his own hand to Newt.

"Stand up. I need you to come with me."


	7. Chapter 7

"Why?" Newt asked, fear forming a lump in his throat. "Where’re we going?"

"I don’t have the jurisdiction to tell," the male soldier replied and shook his hand impatiently in Newt’s face. "You won’t be harmed."

 _Harmed_? All alarms went off in Newt’s head. This wasn’t right. Instinct made him grip the aluminum body of the crutch harder, ready to beat someone with it should it become necessary.  


"No," he said. Weakly, with as much determination as a child having to choose only one piece of candy.

The female soldier then took a step back, holding her gun firmly to her chest. "Take him," she said.

And her companion did.  He crouched down and grabbed Newt by both shoulders, his long, gloved fingers digging in underneath the teen’s collarbones as he was pulled off the floor. Newt tried to fight, squirming and flailing his arms to get away, but he had no chance. He was a thin, bony young man, plenty of edges to grab at, strong for his size but not stronger than a near two metre trained soldier. Newt cried out in agony when his thrashing about strained his impaled knee. He fell forward into the soldier’s arms and couldn’t get loose again.

"Stop it, kid!" the soldier roared as he started dragging Newt away. "Now, I can carry you, but you’ gon’ have to cooperate!"

Newt blinked the tears of pain from his eyes, biting his lower lip again. He looked around the crowded hallway where all the other bomb victims sat unmoving, grasping their burn marked wrists, confusion and fear on their faces. The Eastern soldiers had their weapons in hand, but not pointed at anyone in particular. The civilians didn’t dare try to help Newt. For a split second Newt feared that they were giving him up because he was an Easterner, but that just couldn’t be true. Never before had his heritage been an inconvenience or hindrance in any way. But when he saw that no one was coming to his aid, Newt finally stopped trying to fight the soldier.

"That’s the spirit," the soldier growled, a smirk almost audible on his voice.

The soldier paused for a bit, reached down so that his arm was underneath Newt’s knees and placed the other behind the boy’s back. Then he hoisted the teen into the air with little regard for his injured knee. Newt let out a gut wrenching howl as the pain shot up his leg and spine, new tears moistening his eyes.

The soldier said nothing. He took off with Newt in his arms through the hospital corridors, past the same kind of scene over and over — people being branded and registered, unable to stop any of this madness.

* * *

The hospital was in sight, and Thomas felt, even at this distance, that they were walking straight into a trap. Cars with the light bars flashing blocked the road far ahead, helicopters circled the big, grey structure of the hospital with huge spotlights illuminating the area. It looked like a prison, not a place of healing and refuge.  


There were hundreds, thousands even, marching in the direction of the hospital — or Safe Zone 2 as the map on the war message papers called the three-block area around it. Minho and Thomas were just two boys in the crowds, leaning on each other as if the other was the last stable thing in the universe. Neither of them could run anymore — Thomas from complete and utter exhaustion, Minho from the excruciating shock of his parents’ apparent demise. He had said nothing since the burnt-out car, stating that finding Newt was their priority for now.

Thomas wished he could say something, but he had nothing. The weight of not knowing whether his mother was alright in Ilestead was crushing him, and he couldn’t even imagine what it was like for his friends. Newt had his father and step-mother, and Minho still had no idea if his brother and sister were still alive.

Thomas had wondered about another thing during their trek back. The war message stated that they were going to be registered upon arrival to the Safe Zones. What did that even mean? Were they being rounded up and numbered like cattle? Sorted into groups depending on how useful they were? Thomas remembered history class, a war long ago and far away where a certain group of people had been near exterminated just for their beliefs. Shudders went through his body. No matter which way he looked at it, registration still sounded like a very bad thing. But what choice did they have? If they wanted to find Newt they had to go to the hospital. And if they did not register, they’d been hunted and killed for sure.

The closer they go to the hospital, the denser the crowds got. Minho’s face tensed, wrinkles of anger forming on his shiny forehead. They were still a hundred metres from the blockade surrounding Safe Zone 2, and the masses were hardly moving now.

Thomas glanced sideways at Minho, his annoyance contagious. He grabbed the black-haired teen by the hand. "Come on," Thomas said and pulled Minho along.

They elbowed their way passed person after person, making themselves as small as they could to squeeze through the throngs. Fifty metres, twenty-five, fifteen. They were close enough now to see what was going on at the blockade. First there were three lines of dark-clothed soldiers blocking the street, visors down and carrying big weapons, keeping the citizens of Hallstay back. Behind the lines were cars, tanks and other military-looking vehicles parked to form a sort of wall. Some had canons mounted on the roofs, others searchlights. In the exact center of the street stood a small platform, and on it stood three people surrounded by even more soldiers. One of them, a broad-shouldered woman with silky, grey-lined hair had a megaphone in her hand, and she was yelling out information and commands in a steady, powerful voice.

"Men and women, please separate! Men follow blue banner! Women follow yellow banner! Do not fear, you will be able to reunite once you pass registration! Men follow blue banner, women yellow! Children under the age of sixteen should stay with their parents! Uninjured men and women aged seventeen to twenty-five should follow red banner!"

Minho flinched at that last sentence, his face drawn in a new kind of fear. He looked at Thomas, scanned him from top to bottom. He was bandaged, walking awkwardly due to the pain in his lower back. He kept his wounded eye closed and dried blood covered his clothes. Minho on the other hand was physically quite unharmed. Thomas knew what Minho was thinking even before he said it.

"I’m not leaving you."

Thomas nodded in agreement — there were few things he was more sure of in this madness than that he was not leaving Minho’s side.

Their hands almost glued together not to lose track of each other, the two young men made their way toward the left side of the street blockade where a bright blue flag hung limply on a pole. The people were too tightly packed to push passed now and the moving forward was agonisingly slow. Thomas didn’t let go of Minho’s hand even when the other’s grip relaxed, and Minho didn’t seem to mind much.

At least an hour passed before they finally reached the little opening in the barbed wire fence put up between the civilian masses and the lined-up soldiers. Four soldiers guarded the opening, grabbing the men one by one and pushing them through to their colleagues on the other side. Thomas watched as the tall, dark-skinned man in front of him was held against a wall, body searched before the soldiers put a small machine to his wrist and ushered him to move on. Then the armed soldiers guarding the entrance pushed Thomas ahead.

The soldier who searched him was female, and so was her partner with the little machine. She glanced at him, giving him a quick once-over before tapping a few times on her little notepad.

"State your name and country of origin."

Thomas was taken aback by that last part, thinking that his country of origin should be quite obvious. "Uhm… Thomas Stephens. And I’m from here."

"The West?" she pushed.

"Yes, ma’m." Thomas didn’t like this, or her for that matter. What were they up to?

He didn’t have the time to think about it before the woman grabbed his arm and pushed the end of the small, metallic machine to his wrist. It gave off a little sizzling noise, then he felt a sharp pain and pulled his arm back. The soldier let it go. Thomas held his wrist, but the pain subsided quickly. When he looked at it he saw that a long series of numbers and letters had been burnt into his skin, glowing an irritated red. He stared at the woman in angry disbelief, but she paid no more attention to him.

"Next!" she called, and the soldier who had searched him pushed him through to the other side of the walls of military vehicles. As soon as the soldier let go of Thomas he stopped and looked back, nervously watching Minho’s turn.

"State your name and country of origin, please."

"Minho Hung Yun, The West," Minho said coldly with a stern look at the woman.

The woman asking the questions and the one doing the body search paused and shared a quick look. "You look fit. How old are you?"

Minho’s expression soured even more. "I’m eighteen."

 _They’re gonna take him away!_ Thomas heart screamed. He flew forward, a stab of pain almost sending him to the ground, and caught himself on the fender of an SUV.

"Please!" he called, a little too loud. Minho, the soldiers and even the guards by the entrance turned to look at him. He drew a breath and tried to look as helpless and pained as humanly possible. "He’s with me. He’s all I got. Please, I need him."

Thomas wasn’t sure if it was the sudden pain in his back or if he really was that scared, but his eyes filled up with tears. Those shiny balls of liquid seemed to push the female soldier back from the edge, because she frowned and then grabbed Minho’s arm. She pulled his sleeve up, branded him with he little metal device and nodded sideways for him to move along.

Minho came up to Thomas, his mouth hanging open and eyes wide. "If we make it out of this alive, remember that I love you, you ugly shit."

Even though it was said in the most friendly, brotherly way possible to Minho’s sassy demeanour, it still made Thomas’s heart flutter for just a second. But the feeling was quickly drowned out by a different one, a bad one.

"Why’d they ask where we’re from?" Thomas asked as Minho looked around for someplace to go. "Why’d it matter?"

* * *

"You’re all gonna go home very soon," lieutenant Lynda Apene explained as she strolled back and forth in front of the little group of eight people, looking each of them in the eye with a penetrating, warm green gaze. "Back to The East, back to safety and away from this treacherous country."  


Elise Apene’s gaze fell on Newt, who had grown tired of listening to her going on about justifying their ruthless attack on the city. He tried to look around, but could catch glimpses of soldiers and cars through the opening in the tent.  
Newt had been dropped off inside the tent and immediately a field medic had been assigned to help with his leg injury. They’d given him strong painkillers, then used a small bandsaw to cut off the metal rod where it stuck out from underneath Newt’s knee cap. The medic had promised that they’d have the thing removed when they returned to The East, then cleaned the wound and wrapped it up in new bandages with a splint to keep it straight. At the moment Newt felt little pain, but the painkillers also left his brain a bit fuzzy and his movements lounging. He’d been sitting on the same fold-up chair for an hour as soldier after soldier came and went, dropping off more people who shared no traits with Newt except one — they all originated from The East. A man not much older than Newt named Markus, an elderly pair of women, and a family of four, its two children bearing the names of Agnetha and Aristotle. Any other day, Newt would’ve smiled at meeting a boy his age who was also named after a scientist.

But it wasn’t any other day — he had to do something, and that fast. He couldn’t allow them to just ship him off to The East like some property of theirs. But there were guards everywhere, armed guards, and lieutenant Apene was still circling them.

"Do you have any Eastern born family we should know of?" she asked Markus, the newest arrival. Newt had already told them of his father.

Markus scoffed. "My husband is Western, and I’m not going back unless he comes too."

"I’m afraid that is out of the question," the lieutenant said with little emotion.

"You made me leave him in there!" Markus exclaimed, rising from his chair and pointing at the hospital outside. "I ain’t going anywhere without him!"

Lieutenant Apene stopped her pacing, uncrossing her arms and facing Markus with the coldest, calmest facial expression Newt could’ve ever imagined anyone to have. "Your husband will, if he accepts registration and submits to our laws, be granted full Eastern citizenship when this city is given up by your current government. Until then we want to assure that our own people are safe and secure on our side of the border. You will be allowed to reunite with him once the war is over."

Markus’s face turned a pale red color and his arm muscles flexed. He seemed to try to keep his mouth shut, but the words came out through gnashed teeth. "A war you started."

The two soldiers standing guard by the tent entrance gripped their weapons tighter, observing Markus and Apene as their stared each other down. Markus breathed deeply, hands balled into fists, but the lieutenant seemed unaffected.

"You will thank us when he rebuild Hallstay in Eastern image," Apene said finally.

The corner of Markus’s lip twitched. "There’s a reason I moved away from The East." That seemed to hurt the lieutenant somewhat.

Another half-an-hour passed, and the seven people and Newt were given food in bar-form, water to drink and a few blankets to share. Lieutenant Apene was called away, but another soldier took her place and Newt saw no opportunity to make a run for it. Markus muttered something about grabbing a gun and _getting the hell out of there_ — about once every five minutes. But he had no better chance of making it than Newt had.

Suddenly Lieutenant Apene came through the tent opening again, two more soldiers at her back. Newt noticed she had a holster on her belt now, carrying a gun.

"We have one car ready to take four people back to The East," she told them. "I suggest that women and children be prioritised."

She had looked at the little girl, Agnetha, when she spoke, but Newt one that by children she meant him as well. A lump formed in Newt’s throat again. It was now or never, but he had to be smart about it. he had to wait for the right moment.

No one tried to fight back, not even Markus. With teary-eyed goodbyes the family of four split up, the mother coming with Agnetha and Aristotle to the car and the father staying behind. Newt was ushered to follow too, and was assisted by a soldier when he couldn’t quite walk on his bad leg. There were soldiers in front of them and behind them, as if they were prisoners being transported between cells, as they exited the tent and walked across the hospital parking lot – now turned into a war zone tent camp — toward a big military SUV.

Newt assessed the situation. Twenty metres to the car, one soldier holding his arm, one more behind his back. People buzzing around everywhere, civilian and Eastern military. Plenty of places to run and hide if he could only get away. The soldier helping Newt walk was enormous — he would not go down if tackled by Newt’s meagre 145 pounds.

 _But he would go down by a bullet_ , Newt thought nervously. He’d seen the gun in the man’s holster, fortunately hanging without easy reach for the boy leaning to the man’s side.

Ten metres to the car. Five.

Newt waited no longer. He let go of the soldier’s arm, sliding out of his grip, and grabbed the gun from its holster in the same motion as the soldier tried to stop Newt’s fall. Then he twisted around to get his arm free. A sharp pain stabbed his injured knee, even through the painkillers’ effect. it wasn’t Newt’s intention, but the pain made his fingers twitch.

He pulled the trigger, shooting the soldier in the stomach.

Immediate chaos erupted all around him. Newt and the soldier fell away from each other, Newt scrambling to get away from the scene even before he hit the ground. The other soldiers had their weapons ready to fire within a split second, but didn’t seem to know what to aim for. The mother grabbed her children and protected them with her body, running in the direction of the car with lieutenant Apene. All around them people began shouting and running away, afraid to be caught in the crossfire.

Newt acted fully on adrenalin now — he could see nothing, feel nothing. He got to his feet, grasping the gun and waving it around in complete panic, quickly backing away from the soldier he’d shot, bleeding and wailing on the ground. His companions got a hold of themselves and realised what had happened. Within seconds Newt was staring down the barrels of at least five guns.

"Drop the weapon!" someone shouted.

"Get down on your knees!"

"Don’t shoot!" lieutenant Apene roared. "Hold your fire!"

" _NEWT_!"

The last call had come from a whole other direction. It was iciest, most gut-wrenching cry Newt had ever heard in his life. And to make it even worse, he knew exactly who it belonged to. He never imagined Minho could produce such a sound. Newt whipped his head to the right, seeing Minho running in his direction at full speed. the soldiers saw it too, and turned to aim their weapons at the oncoming threat.

"Minho, _stop_!" came another cry, this time from Thomas. He was stumbling along at a dangerous pace behind the sprinter, and he’d seen the weapons before Minho reacted on them.

"Come no closer!" one of the soldiers commanded, activating a laser pointer that found its mark straight over Minho’s heart. "I will shoot you!"

Minho came to a dead stop, about fifteen paces in front of the soldiers. Thomas ran straight into his back, shuffling to regain his footing as his hands instinctively shot up in the air.

They were at a stand-off. Newt still had three guns pointed his way, lasers being turned on and finding their marks on his chest and forehead. One gun shifting between Minho and Thomas, while the fifth soldier was tending to his injured comrade, calling people over to help him. Newt saw nothing of this. He was looking at his friends, sucking in their existence through his pores like it was a drug calming his nerves and easing the throbbing pain in his body. He let the certainty that Minho was indeed alive and well wash over him like rain. He bathed in the knowledge that his Tommy was breathing and walking. For a few seconds, he saw nothing but Thomas’s dark, glossy eyes looking back at him, their gazes locking and sharing a moment of relief and gratitude that the other’s heart was still beating.

"Drop the gun and get on your knees!"

Newt snapped out of his stupor and realised that he was still pointing a gun at the soldiers. His eyes darted between the three military men in front of him, to Minho and Thomas and back at the guns in the soldiers’ hands. He had no choice — his whole plan had gone to shit when his friends showed up, putting themselves in harm’s way. He’d have to give in to them, put the gun down and subject himself to their arrest. He’d be sent away to The East, and his friends would be…

"No," Newt said then, without really thinking about it. But the word had slipped out, and he rolled with it. He gripped the gun tighter, aware how absolutely idiotic this was. "We’re leaving."


	8. Chapter 8

Thomas had seen it before Minho did, but Minho’s reaction was the soundly one. They’d been walking through the military encampment surrounding the hospital, doing their best to not draw attention to themselves, when suddenly a deafening gunshot had ripped through the air not far away. Thomas’s first reaction had been to pull Minho down to the ground, and as he did he’d seen it — a soldier dropping to the ground further away, his comrades pointing guns at an armed assailant.

Just like at the Carpenter’s house — Thomas would recognise that slender build and blond hair anywhere.

" _NEWT_!"

Minho’s track running skills sent him flying like an arrow, leaving Thomas behind. But those extra seconds allowed Thomas to see the soldiers turn their weapons on Minho once his cry had alerted them to his presence. The terror almost gave Thomas a heart attack.

"Minho, _stop_!"  


[[MORE]]

The black-haired boy skidded to a halt, arms extended from his sides as if ready to punch through a wall. Thomas bumped into Minho from behind and raised his hands as far as his injured back would allow, staring at the ends of the guns where bullets could fly any second and rip the life out of both him and Minho.

And Newt. Thomas really hadn’t imagined he would ever see Newt awake again after he’d seen him in that hospital bed, but there he was — pale, bloodied, roughed up. With a gun in his hands.

"What the hell is going on here, Newt?" Minho growled, not tearing his death-glare away from the nearest soldier.

"The bastards were gonna force us to go back to The East," Newt said. His voice was strained with pain.

Rage flared up within Minho, spreading into Thomas like a wildfire. If Newt was going back to his homeland, it sure as hell wouldn’t be because someone else decided it.

"Don’t move!" one of the soldiers exclaimed.

Newt had been shifting toward his friends, but he froze upon command. He soon realised his mistake, because now he had put equal weight on both legs, and the metal rod still buried underneath his kneecap was making itself known ferociously. Newt’s eyes swam and stars floated before his vision. Weakness poisoned his muscles. He suddenly feared that he would fall unconscious.  
Lieutenant Apene started walking toward him, hands in front of her as so try and calm Newt down. Newt quickly aimed his gun at her instead, causing the three soldiers aiming at him to press their triggers a little harder.

"Isaac, I’m going to be very clear with you now," the lieutenant said. "Put the gun on the ground and come with us. Your friends will not be hurt if you just cooperate."

Newt glanced nervously his friends’ way, hands shaking and the edges of his field of vision blurring more by the minute. Minho stared at Newt pleadingly, Thomas shaking his head, mouthing a silent _no_.

Newt had an idea, although quite hopeless. "I’m not leaving without them. I’ll come if they come too." He could literally feel Thomas and Minho flinching on his right.

Apene’s eyes narrowed. "That’s not an option."

"It is now!" Newt pressed. He felt his body shutting down, the pain in his knees becoming too much. He didn’t see it, but there was blood running in tendrils down his wounded leg and soaking his bandages.

Thomas saw no end to this. There was desperation on Newt’s pale face, and desperation was only going to make things worse. But the same feeling was in his own heart, and he felt Minho shifting anxiously beside him.

"We have to do something," Thomas breathed in Minho’s ear.

"Something like this?" Minho whispered in reply, and then shot forward before Thomas could even register his words.

Minho knew how stupid it was. He risked a bullet in the head, or worse, in Thomas’s. But he’d assessed the situation from every angle — there were four soldiers aiming at Newt now, with only one concentrating on Thomas and Minho. And the ongoing argument between Newt and the lieutenant was straining his concentration. So, when Minho sprinted forward and kicked upwards at the gun, the weapon flew right out of the soldier’s hands. Minho used the momentum he’d gained to push the dazed soldier backwards into his companions. Then he flung himself on the ground to avoid the line of fire, grabbing the gun as it came back down through the air. Someone fired a gun and the asphalt right by Minho’s face shattered, spraying gravel is in his eyes.

"Stop it!" called Newt, aiming the gun furiously at the guards shooting at Minho.

Another shot rang out, and then another. A passing bullet seared the skin on Minho’s shoulder. He was on his back, fidgeting with the gun to get it straight in his hand.

"Thomas, _run_!" he yelled. The gun finally came down right, and his finger was on the trigger. Without hesitation, Minho started firing it randomly at the soldiers. He was too scared, too derailed to care for aim.

Thomas jumped backwards, then to the side. He locked form side to side, to Minho scrambling backwards and away, the soldiers following him as they tried to stay out of his line of fire. Finally Thomas’s eyes fell on Newt, who was still aiming his gun. Hands shaking, unable to pull the trigger. Thomas could literally see the boy’s knees bending. Then, like a tense rubber band being released, Newt collapsed on himself. Thomas hurled himself at his friend, but wasn’t quick enough to catch him before his head hit the ground. The gun fell from Newt’s hand and slid toward Thomas, who picked it up and stuffed it in the lining of his pants. Although his back hurt and his strength wanted to fail him, Thomas got on one knee and scooped Newt up into arms.

Then he ran. He turned in the opposite direction from Minho and shot forward, almost toppling over from the weight of carrying Newt. The blond was out cold, hanging like a boned fish in Thomas’s grip. Thomas swore under his breath. His back was killing him, pain spreading like wildfire through his muscles, and Newt wasn’t waking up. Blood all but oozed from the knee wound underneath red-soaked bandages. Thomas stumbled on as fast as he could.

Chaos had gripped this part of the Safe Zone once the shower of gunshots had begun to sound. People were running around everywhere, seeking shelter wherever they could, trying to fight their way through the blockade to escape a danger they knew nothing about. The Easterners were doing everything in their power to stop it, waving big weapons around and honking their car horns to keep the civilians from leaving. Thomas elbowed his way through scattered crowds, down one street and onto the next. He wasn’t going for any of the houses — they’d be easy targets once the soldiers got together and started searching the buildings. Also, they were already packed.

No, Thomas was aiming from something else entirely. He kept his eyes on the ground, searching. Legs blocked his view everywhere. _Come on, there has to be one around here!_

His back gave way and Thomas couldn’t stop himself from dropping the body in his arms. Newt fell in a heap onto the road and Thomas came down on top of him. He scraped the palms of his hands on the asphalt, but the new pain only mixed with the old one.

Screams in his ears, smoke in his throat. Tears from the terror and pain he was swallowing, creating lines on his dirt-smeared face. Thomas crawled off of Newt and rolled over on his chest. There was drips of blood colouring the wet pavement already from the blond’s leg. Thomas wrapped his hands around the wound, pressing hard.

"Come on, Newt!" he cried out as loudly as he could. Spit flew from his mouth. "Wake up! _Wake up_!"

He’d left Minho behind. His heart contracted with every distant gunshot. They were coming from more than one direction now — Minho’s diversion had started a riot within the Safe Zone. The screams were becoming a choir again, similar to what Thomas had heard when running through the war zone that had once been a quiet city not even two full days ago. And he’d left Minho behind.

"You can’t die!" Thomas yelled, almost drooling, pressing harder on the wound. "You can’t do that!" He wasn’t sure if the words were meant for Newt or Minho.

He didn’t know what to do. He really didn’t. The street around him was emptying quickly, and the perfect cover of panicked masses disappeared. He was too exposed sitting there in the middle of the road with an unconscious Newt. But he couldn’t carry him. And even if he could, Newt was bleeding too much. It twisted his gut to see color draining from his friend’s skin.

Another gunshot, much closer. Thomas looked around on instinct, and fear sent him to his feet. A far away figure was springing right at them, a silvery gun in hand.

Thomas’s heart started singing when the figure’s face came into focus. He didn’t need to hear the calls to recognise Minho.

"Come on, Thomas! _MOVE_!"

As far as Thomas could see, there was nobody following Minho. But the alarm in the dark-haired boy’s voice still wired him up. He tried again to lift Newt off the ground, but his arms failed him. Minho came up to them, and he didn’t hesitate. With an almost inhuman ease, he grabbed Newt but the waist and hoisted him to his shoulder, then set off with Thomas in tow.

"Here!" he exclaimed, tossing Thomas his gun. Thomas barely caught it and corrected his grip as he ran, then he pulled out the other gun. He knew little of guns, but he knew enough.

Minho lead the way, sticking as close to as many people as possible. He seemed to run aimlessly, as if trying to confuse potential pursuers. Thomas wasn’t surprised when he asked, "Where are we going, Thomas?"

Thomas hadn’t stopped looked for it, but so far he’d seen none big enough. Man-hole covers. He knew there were some designed for larger machinery and equipment. He’d figured from the start that underground would be the best hiding spot.  


"Look for man-hole covers!" he huffed between sharp breaths.

Minho liked Thomas’s thinking — trying to hide above ground while still inside the Safe Zone was all but impossible. These people wanted Newt so bad they were ready to shoot two teenage boys to get him, and Minho hadn’t told Thomas that he’d been injured yet.

Yes, his vicious shooting and mad running skills had saved his life and gained him his continued freedom. But in the process he’d taken a bullet to the side. He hadn’t looked at it yet — there was no time until they found somewhere safe to lay low — but it stung like nothing he’d ever felt before. He had no idea how badly it was bleeding. But he’d keep running until he couldn’t anymore. And he’d carry Newt to the end of the world, and Thomas too if he had to, before he gave up willingly.

Both boys saw it at the same time — the entrance of a utility shaft, covered by a large, round metal plate, in the corner of a street alley. Here there were no houses, only apartment buildings, warehouses and a hospice connected to the extended hospital. Thomas dived for the metal plate and dug his fingers into the drainage holes on either side. He crouched down and put all his weight against the plate. It did move, but the weight was just too much.

"Shit," Thomas gasped as he lost his grip and fell back on his rear. "Made of lead, the damn thing."

Minho took a quick look around, quickly scanning the still ongoing chaos. Then he put Newt down on the sidewalk, crouched down next to Thomas, grabbed the heavy lid by its holes and pulled. Their joined strength managed to slide the lid off the man-hole. There was a filthy added going down into complete darkness, and a smell like rotting garbage and clogged toilets rose to hit them in the face.

Thomas gagged. "Oh, god, what is that?" He knew. He didn’t want to know.

"Let’s go, shitface," Minho grunted, then scooted over to lift Newt up again.

When Minho’s arms wrapped around his body, Newt muttered something. Thomas stopped, already halfway down the ladder, and Minho leaned in closer to the blond boy’s face, his treacherous heart beating hard with relief.

"Say that again?" he whispered.

"Leg… my… hurt…" Minho didn’t need anymore than that — he could see the blood-soaked bandages and the little piece of metal still protruding from Newt’s knee. He wished he could do something to help, but there simply wasn’t any time.

As gently and quickly as he could manage, Minho picked Newt up on his back. "Sorry about this. I know it hurts."

Newt moaned and sniffed, but he was barely awake to do it. Using a technique of Thomas and Minho going down the ladder simultaneously, both holding on to Newt to make sure he didn’t fall, eventually all three boys were safely at the bottom of the shaft, with at least ten metres of earth and concrete between them and the surface. Thomas grabbed Newt by the shoulders while Minho climbed back up and managed to get the man-hole cover back into place, drowning the pipe in absolute darkness.

The stench was unbearable. More than once, Thomas felt his empty, growling stomach turn inside out. He heard water running and dripping, echoes bouncing every which way. Once the man-hole cover had closed them in, all sound from the topside world became muffled and blended, like audio shadows in a dimly lit place. Minho came down the ladder next to him, water splashing onto Thomas’s legs as he landed. Suddenly a small but bright light shone from Minho’s hands — a mobile phone screen. He fidgeted with the thing until another, much brighter light pierced the darkness from the back of the phone.

Thomas’s heart sank when he saw their surroundings — dank, filthy pipe walls, mould everywhere and running water of the same, dark color. "How much battery you got?"

"34 percent," Minho sighed. "It’ll be enough."

"Not very convincing." This came from Newt, who Thomas now felt was beginning to stand a little on his own. Most of his weight still rested on Thomas though, and he didn’t trust Newt to walk at all.

Minho was over Newt in a second. "You alive, blondie?" he said, almost in a laughter. "Can you walk?"

Newt, groggy and still not completely conscious, shook his head. "No… No…"  
Thomas put a hand on Minho’s shoulder. "We have to go. I can’t stand much longer, and Newt’s not gonna make it 'less we tie up that wound."

 _Not gonna make it_. Those words made Minho tense up, every fibre of his body ready to fight as if the words themselves were going to harm Newt. And he’d seen the pain Thomas had been in when they were running through Shelby Quarters. Not to mention his own gunshot wound, still unexamined.

Yes, they needed safety. Now.

"Let’s go," he said.

Minho grabbed on of Newt’s arms and flung it over his shoulder. Thomas took the other arm. Together they more or less dragged Newt through the pipeline, moving against the small stream of water. It was the direction away form the hospital, which also meant out of the Safe Zone. If they could just get as far away from the military as possible, then maybe they had a shot at getting out of hallstay all together.

The pipe was in very bad condition. Maybe three metres in diameter at most, even smaller in some places, and filled with rotting leaves and the carcasses of rats. It was also very cold down there, as if the fiery inferno above had done nothing to help heat it up.

Minho let his phone rest whenever he could, him and Thomas using the walls to guide them. Eventually they just couldn’t move anymore. Thomas’s lower back was on fire, and Newt was falling in and out of consciousness, unable to do anything to pull his own weight.

Minho, too, was feeling exhaustion getting the best of him. He was pretty certain that his bullet wound wasn’t that bad, but after all that had gone down and with almost no sleep at all, he could fall over any second. They didn’t even have to say anything. Thomas bent down and gathered piles of decomposing leaves into a makeshift mattress at the bottom of the pipe to protect them from the thin water stream. They sat Newt down, then both Minho and Thomas sank down on either side of their friend.

"Light it up," Thomas said after a while of catching their breaths.

Minho did as he was told and let their little campsite bathe in cellphone light. He aimed the flashlight at Newt’s wounded knee while Thomas carefully unwrapped the bandages. Both boys felt their insides knot at the sight of the injury. Although the blood flow had stopped almost entirely, the wound was dirty and the skin around it was flushed and swollen.

"Holy shit…" Minho breathed.

Thomas could only nod. He looked down at himself and his single sweatshirt, then over at Minho’s clothes. There was tearing cleanly through Minho’s dress shirt, so Thomas grabbed the edge of his sweater and tore at it as hard as he could. A long strip came loose all the way around.  


"It’ll do," Thomas said after he looked at it — bloodstains and dirt and dust.

Newt woke up some as his friend started working on wrapping his knee. He bit down on his tongue and grasped at Thomas’s pant legs when the pain became too much. He was too tired to scream or cry. And when, finally, the wound had been redressed, Newt let his head loll to the side and he slid across the wall until his head rested on Thomas’s shoulder.

In the complete darkness that followed when Minho’s turned off the cellphone, the three boys’ breathing mixed with the sounds of water and sleep crept into their exhausted bodies. All the horrible images faded away for the moment, banished in favour of blankness. Knowledge of the chaos still going on above their heads was put aside. Only tire and the occasional feeling of gratitude that they were still alive and not alone.

Already half asleep, Newt lifted his head and lightly pressed his lips against Thomas’s cheek. "Thanks, Tommy…"

Echoes of the words faded away into nothingness. Thomas was already fighting the nightmares, Newt was quick to join him, and soon even Minho, who had heard the two words Newt had whispered, became too tired to stay awake.


	9. Chapter 9

With no light to invade their swollen eyes, all three boys slept until hunger woke them up. Minho found that opening his eyes made no difference in the complete darkness, so he kept them closed as he let the white noise of the sewers flood his consciousness. Water dripping, metal clanking, the disgusting tip-tap of rat feet running far away. He stretched his aching joints one by one, grunting loudly when the pain in his side reminded him of the past day's events.

_Shot and lived. Adding that to my resumé_. It felt wrong to smile about it, though.

"You okay, Minho?" asked Thomas in a low voice. Minho heard him whining too when he started moving, his body stiff from sleeping in the same hunched sitting position.

"Never better," Minho groaned. "Who'd want a hospital bunk after this?"

"How's your side?" Genuine concern. It made Minho feel worse, because it made their situation seem all the more real.

Minho moved around a bit more, dared to stretch his back. The pain that followed felt like someone pulled a string from his body, allowing his skin to tear apart. He swallowed a high-pitched cry, the groaning causing him even more pain.

"That bad," was Thomas's hurtful reply. Then, after a long silence, he said, "We'll fix it. We'll fix all of it."

"Fix what?"

"Us," Thomas said shortly. Minho waited for an explanation. "Our lives. We're getting out of here, we're finding our families. We go north, away from the border."

Images that Minho wished had never existed flashed before his eyes — images of fire and corpses and burned out cars. His parents. He still hadn't dealt with the most immediate grief, just pushed it away in favour of more important things like staying alive. He didn't want to believe it, but his gut told him it was true — this war had orphaned him. All wishful thinking aside, he knew that his parents were in that house when the bomb fell. In a way, he had already accepted that. What clasped his heart and squeezed it tight was the uncertainty of wether his brother had survived the attacks. There was no way of knowing if Chihong had been at home. And then there was his sister, who if fate had been good to her was safe in her countryside house with her boyfriend, watching the city burn far, far away.

"Newt's father will be taken back to the South if they find him," was the first thing that came to Minho's mind to say.

Thomas hummed in agreement. "Do you want to look for your brother?"

Minho's answer surprised even him. "No. We can't go anywhere inside the city now. They'll take us all in. If Chihong is still alive, he can take care of himself." _Heartless bastard, I am._

Thomas did no try to argue with Minho. He was sadly right — they'd put targets on their own backs, and Newt had a big, glowing neon sign on his. A huge lump was forming in Thomas's throat, choking him. His stomach ached for anything substantial, but also from the pressure of it all. The events of the past few days weighed on him, like being buried underneath a landslide. He saw no end but the one he'd just proposed to Minho, and even he had a hard time believing it. Even less believable was the fact that before those planes had appeared in the sky, Thomas's greatest concern had been a goddamn biology paper.

Life sucked.

Minho broke the silence that had consumed the sewer tunnel. "Newt, you awake?"

No reply. Both boys could hear the steady, although quite quick-paced breathing of their friend between them. During their time asleep, Newt had slid off the wall until he was lying on his side, his head awkwardly propped up against Thomas's thigh.

"Come on, sleeping beauty, up'n'at'em," Minho sighed, scooting over to shake Newt's arm gently.

It took a little more rousing to spark some life in the near comatose blonde. He drew a long, sharp breath, holding it for several seconds while the initial pain reminded him of the day before. tTears formed in his eyes, stinging as he rubbed a dirty hand over his face.

_Please be okay_ , Minho thought. That wasn't what he said. "Good morning. Or afternoon. Or whatever."

"Hey," was Newt's sluggish reply, followed by more pained grunts. The he silenced and stopped moving. He spoke with an alarmed clarity. "Where are we? It smells bloody awful."

"The sewers underneath the city, so, yeah," Thomas said. "How're you feeling?"

Newt only hummed a reply that could mean anything, really. However when he tried to pull himself into a sitting position, he let out a shriek so shrill is made both Thomas and Minho shudder.

"Don't move!" Minho exclaimed and fumbled for his phone. The blackness of the tunnel was soon flooded in a dim light, that to the eyes of the three boys was as painful to look at as the sun.

"Oh, god, point that thing somewhere else!" Thomas moaned.

Minho turned the screen to his face to look at it. The red colour of the battery bar, flashing a painful 10% charge left, annoyed Minho on a whole new level. Could literally nothing work in their favour? Apparently not, but he turned on the flashlight and pointed it to Newt's wounded knee. Thomas was already tearing a new strip of his undershirt to use for bandages, the brim of it now reaching him halfway down the stomach. He handed the shirt strip to Newt, then started to slowly, carefully unwrap the old bandage. Minho watched Newt's face all the time — his pale, greyish complexion, the beading sweat and the sunken, half-closed eyes. Minho didn't need to see the wound to know Newt was really sick.

Thomas was now on the last layer, the one closest to the wound, and he knew this was going to be painful. Body fluids had dried into the fabric, red and blackened blood, yellowish puss and grime, gluing it to his leg. Thomas looked Newt in the eye and the blond boy nodded while biting his lower lip.

Newt gave a quick, blood-curdling cry when Thomas carefully pulled the cloth away, centimetre by centimetre. When it was all gone, Thomas threw it away and paused to look at the injury. He wanted to puke, and Newt was looking at the ceiling of the tunnel, breathing rapidly to work through the pain.

"Holy shit," Minho breathed, quoting himself from last night. "This ain't good."

"No, I know," Thomas sighed and looked for something to dry his dirty hands on. His pants on the insides of his thighs were pretty clean still, so he dried his hands off there and took the new strip of cloth from Newt.

Before wrapping it again, Thomas and Minho determined that the wound was badly infected and needed some real medical attention.

"Do you have a fever?" Minho asked Newt, who still refused to look at his knee. Newt nodded tiredly but without hesitation.

Thomas began working on wrapping the wound up as gently as possible, making sure the cleanest area of the strip was facing the injury. Another two percent had come off the phone's battery life, so Minho resorted to using the screen itself as a lamp instead of the flashlight.

"We could raid a house," Thomas said after a while. "Get ourselves some medicine, clean clothes. Water and food."

"There are people everywhere, suck-face," Minho scoffed half-heartedly. "We'll be seen and then we're screwed."

"Not if we get far enough away from the Safe Zones," Thomas countered. "We didn't see a single soldier in Shelby, did we? Not in Arnagard either."

"We risk getting shot, remember that? The whole ' _treachery is punishable by death_ ' thing?" Minho argued, riling himself up.

Thomas was about to argue too, but Newt cut him off. "He's right, Minho. We can't stay here. You'll starve. I'll be dead long before that from damn blood-poisoning."

"Shut up," Minho snapped at him, but the battle of wills was over. He glanced at the phone again, now down to only 5% and beeping desperately to be charged. Minho shut it off completely with a heavy sigh, letting darkness resume.

Thomas didn't want to speak, afraid he'd make Minho even angrier, but he still had things to say. "I ain't planning on running away. We'll find some way to get back here and find our families. But we can't do it like this."

Minho didn't like it, not a single part of it. Yes, he'd said earlier that he couldn't risk looking for his brother, but in his heart he knew he wanted to so badly. He wanted to go back to his house and dig his parents out, just to make certain that they weren't still alive somewhere. The whole attack on their peaceful city, the unmaking of the near perfect life he'd had, it was tearing him to shreds. And then there was that little, tiny fact — the last drop that threatened to overflow his cup — that Newt had kissed Thomas last night.

And it made him even more angry that such a small action bothered him when his entire world was going to shit.

Newt didn't have the energy to try and sugarcoat the situation. "I probably can't walk on my own. If we want to get anywhere, we should go now."

Thomas nodded, then turned to Minho for confirmation. Minho still wouldn't look at him, but there was no spite, only defeat in his voice when he said "Let's move."

According to Minho's phone, it was 2:40 in the afternoon when they started moving. About half-an-hour of a turned-on screen later, the phone buzzed in Minho's hand and died. The complete darkness that followed was enough to convince even their most frightened thoughts to reconsider. The unanimous decision was that Minho would scout ahead for ladders and possible man-hole covers leading to a safe place, while Thomas stayed put with Newt. It was simply too dangerous, not to mention exhausting, to travel all three blindly through the sewers. And although he refused to say it, Newt was losing strength by the minute.

Both boys were almost asleep on the sewer floor when the sounds of Minho's footsteps echoed back to them.

"I found something!" Minho called, way too loud. "Tell me you're alive so I don't friggin' step on you!"

"Over here, Minho," Thomas said in a lower voice to tell the asian how close they were. He shifted to his feet and stood up slowly, pulling the weight of the half-asleep Newt with him.

Minho's hand, held out as to not bump into them, touched Thomas's chest. "Oh, hi. I've got something. It's quite far, but it seems to go up somewhere in Horronway by the looks of it. Couldn't see a soul from the street."

"We'll give it a go," Thomas said and corrected Newt's arm around his shoulder. Minho moved in to take the other arm, and together the three of them made their way forward through the complete darkness.

It really wasn't easy, such a simple task as walking in a straight line. Newt did his best to help, but his injured knee and the infection rendered his left leg unusable. His entire body ached, his head hurting from the fever. He knew that his friends were in no better condition. So his shut his mouth, bit down on the pain and continued. Sometimes stars would appear in the darkness and the floor would suddenly shift, but he knew it was just his body trying to give up, and he wouldn't let it.

The only positive thing for Thomas was that the pain was so spread out across his body that it became one, single sensation to battle. His back, his scraped palms, his aching joints, his stomach and head wanting to implode from lack of food and water — it was all so tiring. Although he pretended so for the sake of Minho and Newt, there was almost no fight left in him.

"Wait, wait, wait," Minho said suddenly, stopping their group. "Turn here."

Eager to get out of this stink hole, Thomas and Minho pulled a little hard on Newt and he yelped as his knee changed angle. Not much further they stopped again and Minho let Thomas carry Newt. Minho left their physical presence and the sounds of him moved upward, echoing against walls that none of them could see. Then came a grunt of effort from their friend and a loud scraping noise, followed by the brightest light they could've imagined.

Minho squinted and fought the urge to turn his head. He pushed the heavy lid to the side and climbed up until he was sitting on the edge. He was in the middle of a parking lot, with a small city forest on one side and big apartment complexes on the other. The smell of things burning was perhaps even worse than the stank of the sewers below. Smoke rose from several places, mostly from houses and apartments behind the building closest to the parking lot. The damage from a fire bomb that had hit the far edge of the open space, barely gracing the building, was not as severe as it had been intended. Hardly any cars were left, probably stuck on the highway by now, and the ground was littered with the same printed messages that had fallen from the skies above Minho's destroyed home. And, just as before, not a single soul in sight.

"Horronway District," Minho mumbled to himself. "Never thought I'd ever come here willingly."

It took a lot of pain, sweat and harsh words from each of the exhausted boys before Newt was sitting safely above ground, shading his eyes with his hand. Minho looked around anxiously for anything that moved while Thomas all but collapsed on the ground, stretching his throbbing back against the coolness of the asphalt.

Nobody needed to ask the question before Newt answered it. "We head for one of the houses. Easier to break into than a flat."

Minho nodded his reply, still looking around, then walked over and bent down to pick Newt up. For some reason that he hated, this time he couldn't swallow a groan of pain when he compressed the wound in his side.

Newt, although feverish and barely conscious, noticed. "What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing," Minho said, too quickly.

"He took a bullet to the side," Thomas explained, slowly standing up and approaching his friends. "How's it doing?"

Minho couldn't argue that he was curious to know himself, now that they had the light. He lifted his shirt, careful not to hurt himself further as he separated the fabric from the wound where dried blood had glued them together. It didn't look nearly as bad as it felt — he bullet had graced him, tearing at the flesh and maybe scratching a rib, but the damage was shallow. When nobody commented on it, Minho let the shirt back down and gave an obviously fake smile.

"Never better. Now, let's move."

Half-leading, half-pulling Newt between them, Thomas and Minho made their way south from the parking lot, between two blocks of flats and through the playground and the courtyard. Smoke from still burning buildings stung in their eyes, but they could all agree it was better than the stench underground. Although they imagined frightened eyes watching them through the windows above their heads, nothing stirred but them. Horronway had always been a rogue area, the place where thugs were born and the shops had bars on their windows at night. When the boys had been younger there had been a series of kidnappings of girls and young women, all of which had been found within a week with only minor injuries but traumatised for life. The incident had earned the place the nickname Horrorway, but it never stuck. Of course, as with every slum part of a big city, there were the more luxurious blocks sitting a bit too close to the "less civilised" areas for the real rich people to want to live in. As the boys crossed the asphalt yards of the local school, that was where they ended up.

They chose the closest house — as good a one as any. Once more Minho left Newt to lean on Thomas while he took a look around the residence. It was a medium sized, two-story thing with a very small garden up front and a drive-way without a garage. The greenish blue paint was faded and the design was quite old compared to its neighbours. As with almost every single building in the city by now, some of the windows had exploded inward by the force of nearby explosions. Minho took two turns around the house, looking through the windows to make sure they were alone. Then he signalled for Thomas and Newt to go to the front door before crawling in through a broken window. His friends could hear him walking through the house and waited patiently by the door.

With a click the door unlocked and swung open. Minho made a scene and bowed deeply to the boys outside in a regal manner. "Welcome to my humble abode, gentlemen," he said, trying to imitate Newt's southern dialect.

Thomas smiled earnestly for the first time in days and Newt rolled his eyes in tired amusement, but their cheerful mood didn't last long at all. A shadow snuck up behind Minho in the doorway, and before any of them could react there was the silvery barrel of a gun sitting snugly against Minho's head.

A girl's voice came from the shadow. "Move and I shoot."


	10. Chapter 10

Minho, Thomas and Newt froze where they stood, the smiles wiped off their faces as if they'd never been there.

"Hands in the air, all three of you," the girl voice said. It was a very deep female voice, commanding yet soft. "Slowly."

Thomas kept his eyes locked with the shadow of the girl, the dark eyes that moved between her hostages. She wasn't very tall, with short-cropped hair and dark clothes. He really hadn't seen her sneaking up on them until her gun was already at Minho's head. Thomas nodded reassuringly and lifted his hands, the one holding on to Newt by his side only slightly visible behind the blond's back. Newt didn't try to lift his arms, knowing he'd fail and fall over, but made certain that they were visible to the girl while clinging to Thomas's shoulder.

Minho didn't make a move at all.

"Show me your hands," the girl all but purred. "There ain't no safety on this gun."

Minho still did not move. The corner of his mouth rose a little and he looked Thomas in the eyes. Thomas knew that his friend was about to try something reckless, like he had back at the Safe Zone, but this time the gun was much closer. If she fired, Minho was done for, so Thomas shook his head as discreetly as possible.

"You know, if you come a little closer I can show you how to put the safety on," Minho sneered and started moving his arms upward. The girl shifted a little backwards behind him, still pointing the gun behind his ear. "It's not that _HARD_!"

Minho began to swirl around to his left, but had hardly moved an inch before two gunshots rang out simultaneously. Thomas pulled him and Newt down on the ground just after the gravel at their feet exploded and sent a rain of little stones in their faces. Minho made only a half-circle movement before hitting the doorframe and sliding down on the floor, holding one hand over his ear as fresh, red blood oozed between his fingers.

"Fucking shit!" the black-haired boy cried out in between grunts of pain. "You shot me!"

"She warned you, didn't she?" came a man's voice.

Thomas spun around on the ground to his left to see a man in a long, black coat walking toward them, a big riffle in his hand. His tanned face was wrinkled and the dark hair was more grey than anything else. Too out of it by the sudden release of bullets to do anything smart, Thomas scooted backwards away from the approaching man, pulling Newt by the shirt along with him. He glanced sideways for but a second, seeing Minho lying on the threshold with a bloodied face and shoulder. He and the girl, whose gun was still locked to his head, stared at each other with murder in their eyes.

When the man was about three meters away from Newt and Thomas, he stopped. "Isn't it a little funny how war can change people so quickly? Like, I haven't touched these guns since I bought them. Been hanging on the wall gathering dust. And I have a feeling, just… a gut feeling telling me you boys have never broken into a house before in your lives. Am I right?"

There was a dialect to his speech that didn't match any neighbouring countries of The West. He certainly wasn't from The East. And the way he carried himself was… cocky, to say the least. None of the boys knew if he really wanted them to answer his little question or just stay silent for their own safety. He looked them over one by one, then back again and once more.

When no reply came, the man turned to Minho. "You, boy. You from The East?"

"Me, what? No," Minho muttered.

"Your dialect before," the girl said, moving the gun for emphasis. "You faked it?"

"Yeah?" Minho replied, not really getting why it mattered. It's not like they looked like Eastern soldiers or anything. "Why?"

The girl and the man shared a look that only they could understand, then the man lowered his rifle and nodded for the girl to do the same. She seemed reluctant, but followed suit. Minho took the chance the pull himself up into a sitting position, back against the doorframe and both hands clutching the side of his face. He could feel between his bloodied fingers that part of his ear was missing. Not a big piece, but it hurt even worse than his side wound and angered him like nothing else. God, was he tired of getting shot!

The man looked around the street outside the house, his demeanour changed into something far more serious. He turned once more to the girl and nodded toward the house. "Get them inside, help patch 'em up. I'll take a look around."

The face the girl made was that of obvious disbelief. She really did not want to let them in. But even though she wanted to argue — her mouth even opened as if to say something — she remained quiet and furrowed her brow instead. She reached down to help Minho to his feet, but the boy slapped her hand away and used the doorframe to get up. Newt waited until Thomas was vertical and could help him before trying to stand up. He watched the man as he vanished down the street, still wielding his rifle. Then, as Thomas put his arm around him for support, Newt got up close to his ear.

"I don't trust this," he whispered. "What's their bloody motive?"

Thomas didn't answer, but Newt saw the same suspicion in his chocolate eyes as he felt in his gut. Maybe it was the way things had been going for the past couple of days — like the man had said, war changes people — but Newt really didn't like this. Being ushered inside an unknown house by an unknown girl with a loaded gun, who had just fired a shot that could've killed one of his best friends, while an unknown man _took_ _a_ _look_ _around_ … No, Newt didn't like this.

But other things got the best of him not long after their entered the house. It was dark and looked exceptionally normal apart from the floor being littered with glass and shattered pieces of a mirror. The girl opened a door underneath the stairs that revealed another, narrower stairway leading down. Minho went first, hesitating on the first step to give the girl another murderous look, then disappeared into the even deeper darkness below. Thomas and Newt followed. The basement where they landed was lit up by two battery-charged lamps on the floor and a whole bunch of candles sitting on a wall shelf. There was a workbench overflowing with nameless gadgets and junk, an old CD player radio, a heap of blankets and pillows in the corner and a whole lot of canned food.

With no direction on where to go, and the girl paying them no attention when coming down the stairs, Thomas decided to be bold. He put Newt down on the blankets and let him lay down on one of the pillows. Newt didn't try to resist. As soon as his head touched the softness of the pillow it was as if his body gave up. He tried to fight it, didn't want to leave his friends alone. The pain from the infection in his knee consumed his existence, and the sickness clouded his mind. He drifted off into a fever dream, not asleep but not awake either.

Thomas wanted to sit down, but when turning around to look for Minho he came face to face, or rather shoulder to face, with the girl. She looked up at him barely half a meter from his face with big, round eyes that looked to have no end to them in the dim light of candles. The short hair was straight with ruffled bangs following the shape of her head perfectly. There wasn't anything to be read from her expression — she just… observed.

"Don't get too comfortable," she said after a long while, then walked passed Thomas without breaking eye contact. She crouched down right by Newt's head and looked him over. "What's wrong with him?"

"Don't touch him," Minho hissed poisonously from the opposite corner, getting the attention of both Thomas and the girl.

The girl didn't seem affected by Minho's tone at all. She gave Minho a once-over with her eyes just like she had Thomas just a moment ago, Minho's return stare seeming to want to burn right through her.

"He's sick," Thomas said before anything caught on fire for real. "He's got a knee wound that's infected."

"It should be if you hid down in the sewers," the girl replied with no obvious emotion. She inched over to the other end of the makeshift bed and started to examine Newt's leg.

"I said don't _touch_ him," Minho snapped at her, about ready to claw her eyes out with his fingernails. Thomas quickly went over to him and held him back, one hand on his chest and the other carefully nestling its way in between Minho's clenched fingers. He took the hand in his own and squeezed it to calm Minho down.

When Minho still did not relax, and the straining of his clenched jaw made his ear bleed more profusely, Thomas sighed. "Can you help us? _Will_ you help us?"

The girl stopped for a moment, her back to them. "I don't seem to have a choice," was her simple reply.

After that, no more words were exchanged between them. The girl quickly got to work on fetching all kinds of medical supplies. Scissors, band-aids, needles and thread, even rubbing alcohol and real bandages. While she helped a half unconscious Newt get his knee cleaned and redressed, as well as various other scrapes and cuts across his body, Thomas turned all of his attention to Minho. He had his friends sit down on the floor between Thomas's legs and lift his arm up as Thomas cleaned his gunshot wound and sowed it together as best he could. It didn't look nearly as bad when all the blood was gone, and when Thomas was done taping a piece of a ripped towel over it, it was as if the injury had never happened.

Minho's ear was another thing, and it hurt like a mother. Minho couldn't stop cursing whenever Thomas brushed against the raw flesh. A very clear piece of his ear, small but visible, had been blow straight off and even though the wound was small it bleed like nothing else. Thomas sorted to pouring some of the rubbing alcohol into the wound, earning a mouthful from Minho, then having the boy press the remains of the towel against it until it stopped bleeding.

"You always shoot your damn houseguests before welcoming them in?" Minho spat at the girl, the most polite thing that had come out of his mouth in at least an hour.

The girl didn't hesitate. "No, just the ones who go through the windows without knocking."

Minho temper was cooling off, and he proved it by remaining silent. He was helping Thomas clean the wound on his eyelid and his badly scraped-up palms and knees. The atmosphere was tense, but in a relaxed way. Nobody had the energy to keep their fighting spirits. Once Minho was done with his work, Thomas slowly laid down until he lay flat on his back on the floor, face to the girl still tending to Newt's leg. He hadn't noticed, but Newt was awake again, his whole face contorted in a grimace of agony, biting down hard against the pain as the girl tried her best to clean the wound.

"How're you doing, Newt?" Thomas asked. Newt only nodded, but it didn't convince any of them in the slightest.

For another long set of minutes dragging by with Thomas and Minho doing nothing but silently observing the girl helping their friend, the sounds of heavy footsteps on the floor above them reached their ears. They grew louder as their walked down the stairs to the basement until the older man appeared. The riffle hung on his back, and in his hands were several bags of what looked like cans and supplies of all types. He said nothing, only sharing another expressive look with the girl, and went on to unpacking his loot on the shelves around the basement.

Newt whimpered and reflex made him arch his back and almost sit up and pull his leg away.

"Don't move!" the girl exclaimed. "You'll make it worse."

"What are you doing to him?" Minho asked and Thomas saw him about to rise to his feet in the corner of his eye.

"There's not much of the wire left in there. I might be able to pull it out," she explained. "Care to help?"

Both boys moved in unison over to the pile of blankets, their stomachs turning. They could not comprehend the full meaning of pulling it out without imagining immense pain and suffering for their friend. Minho positioned himself on the opposite side from the girl kneeling on the floor and took Newt's right hand in his own, while Thomas sat down by Newt's head. The blond boy was looking up at him, his dark eyes clear as day now that his heart was pumping pure adrenalin.

"Okay, how're we gonna do this?" Minho asked, then his eyes widened when he saw the tool in the girl's hands — a big water pump plier. "You're kidding me…"

The girl still wasn't fazed. "I'm gonna need you to hold him down. Give him something to bite down on."

It was the older man that came to their aid with a piece of rubber with no apparent purpose. He handed it to Thomas who put it in Newt's open mouth. Thomas looked down at him in doubt, but the blond boy nodded sternly. He was sweating like hell, glistening in the faint light, and pale as the sheets on which he lay. Brave tears pooled in his eyes as he reached up with his left hand toward Thomas. Thomas took the hand and held it tight, letting Newt bore his fingernails into his skin as he prepared himself. Minho let his free hand rest on Newt's shoulder, the other holding Newt's right hand to his own chest.

All three boys looked to the girl. The girl once more shared a quick look with the man hovering over her shoulder. "We ready?"

The boys nodded, and the girl began. She had barely touched the now open wound with the plier before a muffled yelp erupted from Newt's throat. he closed his eyes tightly and struggled to stay still. The girl did not yield, but kept pushing the pliers deeper.

"Hold him!" she called. The man got down on the floor beside her and put his whole weight onto Newt's thighs and pelvis. Minho used as much strength as he dared to push Newt into the pillows, and Thomas held the blond's head still against his extended leg.

"I think I got a hold of it," the girl said and adjusted her grip. Blood was oozing from the wound and Newt's movements were already calming down as consciousness left him.

"No, no, no! Stay with us, Newt!" Minho growled as Newt relaxed underneath them. For a split second he was shoved back to the Carpenter house, with Newt dead to his eyes under the rubble.

"No, let him sleep," the man said in a calm voice. "You don't want him awake for this."

"Hold his leg," the girl said the to man, and the man shifted his weight onto Newt's left thigh. He used his hands to steady the knee and keep it in place as she adjusted her grip again, taking a deep breath…

… then she pulled with all her might straight up.

Newt remained silent, spared of the expected torture by his on body, but the sound that the little rod made as it exited the boy's knee was enough to twist Thomas's and Minho's hearts. A suction noise, almost gurgling, and metal scraping against bone. The hairs stood up on their arms and necks, sending chills down their spines. Their only relief was that Newt did not move. His chest rose staggeringly up and down, the pallor of his face deathlike but only just.

As soon as she was certain she'd pulled the whole thing out, the girl put the plier to one side and poured more alcohol into the wound. She cleaned it out, emptying it of puss and any dirt that might have entered it. She put a compressor made from paper towels, fabric towels and a clean bandage over the wound, then sealed it all up with package tape. All the while both boys held on to each of Newt's hands, Thomas massaging the white knuckles while Minho simply clutched the relaxed hand like it was life itself. He couldn't pull his eyes away from the girl, the hatred he'd nursed for her now fading in favour of a less than hateful adoration and reluctant feeling of gratitude.

The girl rose up without a word when she'd finished wrapping the knee. Thomas just couldn't keep quiet anymore.

"What's you name?"

The girl continued with what she was doing, but she seemed to weigh the pros and cons of telling them her name. "I'm Brenda," she finally said, then gestured to the man who had sat himself down on the edge of a workbench, eying them. "He's Jorge."

Thomas was about to ask where they came from when the man opened his mouth. "And Jorge would like to know who you are. Three questions; what's your names, where do you come from, and what can you tell me about what's going on out there?"

This time it was Minho and Thomas who shared a silent exchange between brown eyes. This reminded them both of the security check back at Safe Zone 2, and the branding on their arms suddenly itched. Tired of willing Minho to silence, Thomas let his friend carry the conversation.

"Minho, Thomas and Newt," he said, pointing to each of them in turn. "We live in Arnagard and Hoshport, and… or, used to… We were brought to the hospital after a friend's house was bombed. Then the soldiers appeared and started rounding people up. We got caught in one of the Safe Zones but we got out of there."

"How?" Brenda asked, now fully concentrating on Minho's story.

"Like we said before, through the sewers," Thomas said.

Brenda was looking at Thomas again with those deep, dark eyes that seemed to stare right through him in an unimpressed manner. "Do you seriously expect me to believe that the three of you escaped from the easterners all by yourself?"

"Don't test my patience, sister," Minho said with a snarl.

"And you better not test mine!" Jorge said then, raising his voice with every syllable, leaning forward. Then he fell back again and gave a sly smile. "My castle, my rule. Just saying. Now, tell me about the easterners. Anything you know, I want to know. Were you registered? How heavily armoured were they? The lot of it."

Minho threw his hands up in the air, leaned back against the wall and sighed. So Thomas told them everything — about when the first bomb fell, the continued air raids, what the planes looked like. Jorge nodded in agreement, obviously already aware of the initial attacks. His expression changed when Thomas got to the part about the hospital siege, explaining how the soldiers asked where they came from and tattooed serial numbers into their arms. The hundreds upon hundreds of soldiers driving armoured vehicles and tanks. Jorge seemed most interested in the separation of battle ready youths from the rest at the borders of Safe Zone 2.

Thomas was just about to get to the part where he and Minho rescued Newt from the eastern soldiers when a light switched on in his head. Jorge and Brenda had seemed more violent when believing Minho to be from the East. Would they still help the boys if they knew of Newt's true origin?

Thomas decided against telling them, and changed the story somewhat. "When we got to the hospital and grabbed Newt they tried to keep us from leaving, so we slipped into the sewers and got out that way." Jorge waited for more, so Thomas added, "That's it. Then we came here."

Jorge sat still and quiet for a long while, deep in thought. Brenda and the boys waited until he suddenly stood up and clapped his hands together soundly.

"Brenda, dear, let's get some food into these lads. I'll lock up."

Brenda still looked like she hated every second of shared air with the boys, but did as she was asked without complaints. Jorge moved toward the stairs, grabbing a key hanging on a hook on the wall as he passed. Then he turned around to look at Minho and Thomas once more.

"Don't get your hopes up, kids. I haven't decided about keeping you yet."

Then he disappeared up the stairs, leaving Minho and Thomas to wonder what kind of mess they were in this time, and if they were really in a safer place now than last night.


	11. Chapter 11

His body begged him to sleep for even a little bit, but Minho couldn't close his eyes the entire night. He kept watch over his two boys, one laying as motionless and feverish as before by Minho's feet, the other cradled up underneath Minho's arm against the wall. Jorge and Brenda slept in the opposite side of the basement, the man on a squeaky fold-up bed and the girl on a mattress brought down from the house. The loaded gun lay on the floor by Brenda's head, but Minho was certain that she was asleep which meant that they trusted the new arrivals to some degree. It was hard for Minho to admit, but he trusted these people too. Kind of. After all, without them there was no telling where he and his friends would have been sleeping tonight, and if they'd have food, water and medicine working wonders in their beaten bodies.

More than anything, Minho had them to thank for Newt's health. They'd propped him full of every fever-breaking painkiller there was, and Jorge had even said that they'd make a house run the next day to look for more. Minho hoped that they'd find some penicillin to battle the infection still crawling up Newt's leg.

Thomas shuddered in his sleep, and Minho started to mindlessly stroke his hand up and down his friend's arm. His other hand was entangled with Newt's fingers. Having them both this close, especially the blond, made Minho feel safe and strong. He'd watch over them, he'd keep them safe.

The hours passed by and Minho drifted in and out of half-sleep until Thomas started moving by his side. He yawned and stretched a little, not moving away, then looked up into the eyes of the young man whose arms he'd slept in.

"Good morning," he said, not facing away even though their mouths were literally only fifteen centimetres apart. "You sleep at all?"

"Nah," Minho said, shrugging with a light smile. Then he turned serious again. "I don't trust them."

Thomas turned his head to look at their hosts sleeping quietly by the far wall. He rested his head against Minho's chest and let his tired eyes close for a while. "Me neither. We can try to leave if you want to, but I don't think we'll make it very far."

Minho knew what he meant — Newt. They'd have to wait and see if he'd heal and regain enough strength, then they had a chance of getting back on the move again. Until then…

"I'll go with him today," Thomas said. "See what's out there, try to find some more medicine and supplies."

A lump formed in Minho's throat. "With Jorge? No way."

"Why not?"

"You just said you don't trust them, now you wanna go off alone with one of them?" Minho saw the flaws in his argument even before Thomas pointed them out, but stood firm anyway.

"That's exactly why," Thomas said quietly, willing Minho to keep his voice down. "I'll make sure to really look for something for Newt. The sooner he's on his feet, the better. Then we run."

Minho couldn't argue with that last part. He didn't have to like the terms. He glanced at Newt's sleeping form, the steady rise and fall of his chest, and suddenly another feeling tightened his throat. It wasn't his intention to act on it, but the words slipped out before he had a chance to think them through.

"Did he kiss you yesterday?" Instant regret filled him.

Thomas tensed, and for a moment he was back in the complete darkness of the sewers. Too tired back then to have reacted to it, he felt the tender touch of dry lips above the corner of his mouth.

_Thanks, Tommy._

Newt _had_ kissed him. Thomas had no idea how he felt about that. He hadn't considered the idea, the sheer possibility, of it. Well, yes he had, but not with Newt. In the dark and lonely nights he could sometimes think about the softness of Minho's skin, the pulsing of his muscles or the mystery in his eyes. But Newt had kissed _him_.

"No, what are you talking about?" was Thomas's answer. He hated himself for lying.

Many minutes ticked by in silence, and it made Thomas feel absolutely horrible when Minho removed his arm from him. Eventually Brenda stirred and woke up. She turned around underneath the covers to look at the boys, then rose up and put on some more clothes without a word. The boys watched her discreetly as she went around lighting new candles, hooked up the small, portable boiler to a car battery and began heating up two cans of pasta soup. When it was done and the wonderful smell of food filled the small space, she took a bowl from a shelf, scooped herself a big helping and sat back down on her mattress.

She eyed Thomas and Minho as she drank form the bowl. "I won't serve it to you, if that's what you're waiting for."

After hesitating defiantly, Minho started rising but Thomas put a hand on his knee. "I got it."

He grabbed two bowls from the shelf, then a third when he heard Minho trying to rouse Newt from his fever slumber. Thomas filled the bowls carefully, feeling the eyes of Brenda burning on his skin the whole time. He simply couldn't dislike her the way Minho did, but she sure was something else.

Newt was still out of it, feeling worse now than last night after dinner. He propped himself up against the corner wrapped in blankets, shuddering from high fever, and drank slowly from his soup while Minho and Thomas tended to his leg. It hurt worse now, he said, but when his friends saw the wound it looked ten times better than it had down in the sewers.

"How's your back, Tommy?" Newt asked once his leg was re-wrapped, then nodded to Minho. "And your side?"

Even before either of them could open their mouths, a loud clap sounded and they turned to see Jorge on his feet after having looked sound asleep just a moment ago. All conversation seized as the man went over to the portable boiler, grabbed the saucepan and drank from its steaming contents. He looked at all of them in turn, even Brenda, who gave him a slight rise of her eyebrows as if asking something telepathically. It really bothered all three boys how the two of them could communicate so secretly. Then, after a loud slurp of the soup, Jorge smacked his lips.

"Oh, don't mind me. Go on talking."

The boys just eyed each other, not able to believe this man. Something was very obviously bothering him, and it got on Minho's nerves very quickly.

"Why are we here? Why are you 'keeping' us?" he said, putting his chin out. Newt rolled his eyes in annoyance, but Thomas was beginning to feel the same exasperation Minho was.

"Can't a guy show some mercy to a few kids in need? Ungrateful little brat, you are."

"Not you," Minho pushed, directing his words at both Jorge and Brenda. "You're all shoot first, ask later. What's in it for you?"

"You tell me," Jorge said. "I hear you plan on hauling ass out of this mess. And where to then, huh? The North? Acaand? The LIA?"

Thomas was confused. "We're leaving the city, not the country."

Then Jorge did the last thing the boys expected him to — he smiled, sadly and earnestly. "This ain't a war the West can win, kiddo. It never was."

"What are you talking about?" Newt asked for the three of them.

Jorge didn't respond, only rubbed the top of his head as the smile faded away, then turned and walked over to the workbench to tinker with something. Brenda stood up instead, sought eye contact with Jorge, then looked at the three boys. Or rather Thomas in particular.

"Get moving, we don't have all day," she said, so little emotion that it took him a moment to process her words. "You wanted to scout for medicine, now's your chance."

Thomas shook his confusion away, realising that she must have overhead his discussion with Minho earlier, and that he would be going with Brenda and not Jorge. He stood up and straightened his clothes, careful with his hurting lower back.

"What?" This came from Newt, who wore a more than a little worried expression. Thomas had a hard time concentrating on anything but his lips when he looked at him.

"Don't worry, I won't be gone long." He looked to Brenda for confirmation, getting none.

Minho was on his feet now as well, and as if his moving toward Thomas started a chain-reaction, everyone was at an unarmed stand-off. Jorge moved up next to Brenda and Minho took his place by Thomas' side, arms a little out from his body as if ready to strike anything that dared approach him.

"Hey, son, two of you ain't going out there," Jorge said with warning in his voice.

"Not your son, not taking orders from you," Minho replied.

"Cut it off, all of you!"

Everyone turned to Newt, who was halfway out of his blanket bed, white like a sheet but still carrying the most authoritative posture out of all five of them. He looked at Minho in particular, gave the tiniest shake of his head, then turned to Thomas.

"Just… be careful. Don't die."

Thomas nodded. He didn't really want to think about the possibility of dying today, although the risk was off the scale compared to his normal everyday life. He took one last look at Minho, then at Newt, and then he focused on Brenda. The girl grabbed a backpack hanging from a hook on the wall, and threw another one at Thomas.

"Let's go," she said, and then they were off up the stairs.

* * *

Brenda's way of scouting was stressful and exhausting, although executed with a sort of grace that left Thomas wondering just what kind of girl she was. They sprinted from one house to the other, spending as little time as possible out in the open. She told Thomas multiple times to stay out of sight, although there wasn't a living soul to be seen for miles. When he'd questioned her methods, saying she was being unreasonably careful, she had pulled him into a garden and pushed him into the leaves of a bush. She shushed him, staring straight into his eyes at barely twenty centimetres distance, and pointed toward the sky with one finger. Thomas heard nothing, then a bird, then nothing. The rustling of a few leaves. Then he noticed. Far, far into the distance, he heard something very familiar — the beating propellers of helicopters.

"They. Are. _Everywhere_ ," is all she said.

Two hours later, Thomas had still not grown tired again of sneaking from house to house, doing it all Brenda's way. Once the sounds of helicopters grew louder, they hid wherever there was a roof to protect them from eyes in the sky. Brenda brought him several blocks away before they started actually breaking into places. She moved past several houses, saying only that there was a trick to knowing which ones still hid frightened families refusing to show themselves. The ones they did break into were bountiful. Thomas packed his duffle bags and backpacks full of preservable food, medicines of all sorts, bandages and other life-saving utilities. Brenda was a bit more of a nitpick, going for more specific things like rechargeable batteries, dietary supplements in pill form and toilet paper. Thomas guessed they already had much of the most necessary stuff back in the basement. That didn't stop him from trying to create his own little collection for when he, Minho and Newt went off on their own again.

They continued, black after block in the same manner, not speaking much at all. Thomas observed the skies while Brenda used her ears to allow her eyes more time to focus on potential ground threats. Both soon noticed that they were heading into territories that had been more heavily bombed in the earliest attack. Brenda kept telling Thomas that they were still far away from the nearest Safe Zone, heading for the suburbs of the city.

The sun edged closer to the horizon, the city which was still sending smoke spires toward the clouds.

Thomas sat sideways in the driver's seat of a car standing only a few metres from a bomb crater in the street. Whoever had driven the car had left the key in the ignition, and a whole lot of baggage in the trunk. Brenda finished off scavenging through the wares and closed the trunk, and Thomas looked at her when she walked round to his side.

"I can't carry anymore now," she said. "Sun's going down to, I'm up for some hot food."

Thomas wanted nothing more than to return to his friends, and some cooked food didn't sound bad at all. He hadn't found any penicillin though, but had packed his duffle bags full with every kind of painkiller and disinfectant he could fit.

"Yeah," he sighed.

They didn't move, just looked at each other and their surroundings for a bit. There was silence now, nothing but wind blowing the endless amount of propaganda papers around, the same messages dropped over Thomas's home.

Brenda opened her mouth as if to say something, then closed it again. She pulled the straps of her backpack to hoist it, then flung her own duffle bag over her shoulder and clicked the safety on her gun.

"Come on," she said and gave Thomas a light kick on the shins. "Let's get moving."

This time, as they walked they did not stay as much to the house walls and trees. Brenda lead the way in the open street, and as Thomas followed her, he felt a strange feeling of normalcy. Apart from the smell of things burning, the constant walking around craters, the complete lack of cars and people altogether, it felt like he was just walking home after lacrosse practice or school. The hunger for food and the bag over his shoulder only added to the sensation.

"Who are you? Like, really are, not just since the bombs fell."

Brenda's question caught Thomas off guard. She hadn't turned around to face him, but she slowed her steps until they were walking side by side.

Thomas swallowed, suddenly fighting the urge to spill everything to this girl he hardly knew. "Just… normal, I guess. What do you wanna know?"

"Normal, huh?" Brenda said, smiling. "Normal doesn't get his two best friends out of the middle of an invasion alive."

"It wasn't me. Minho damn near carried me half-way."

"He seemed like the strong one. Muscular, all attitude and please-give-me-a-reason-to-punch-you kind of guy." She said the last sentence in a mocking manly voice.

Thomas couldn't help but smile, especially at the word muscular. But his mind flew back to when Minho had been crying his eyes out in Thomas' arms, sitting in the ruins of his family home.

"What did normal do to pass time when he still had a life, then?" Brenda asked, brushing the images from Thomas' mind.

"Study, mostly. Some sports now and then." He silenced for a moment, struggling to match Brenda's sudden and inexplicable cheerfulness. "I play video games a lot. _Middle War Kidz_ … and _Seeker's Keeper_."

"You study for something special or..?" Brenda pressed.

_You studying for something? Like, a doctor or something?_

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. For just a moment, Brenda had sounded like somebody else entirely, and it made Thomas' heart itch with longing and despair. Teresa, wherever she was, might be dead for all he knew, and he had been about to talk to this girl, answer her, as if she was Teresa. It made him realise that he was trusting her too fast. Or trusting them too fast. Jorge was the biggest problem, but Brenda had something sneaky about her too. Her being all nice and talkative all of a sudden made Thomas feel like he was putting his guard down.

He decided however that his collage dreams weren't necessary secrets. "Biology. I want to become a psychology-biologist, studying brain patterns and how the psyche works, you know, physically speaking."

"Sounds impressive," Brenda said, but nothing more.

"And you?" Thomas asked. "You and your father don't seem to come from around here." He realised how bad it sounded and added, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be," Brenda said, her tone now three levels graver. "We're both from Shicoma, or the South, depending on who you ask. And he's not my father."

Thomas furrowed his brows, recalling the first conversation they'd had with Jorge. "He called you his daughter."

"It just makes it easier," Brenda sighed. "In truth I don't really know what he is. He's just always been there. My parents were— _get down_!"

Brenda hurled herself over Thomas, knocking them both to the ground. A split second later, a gunshot rang out and a bullet passed over their heads and hit a wooden fence behind them. Brenda was quick to answer the fire with several shots of her own, but her aim was so off that Thomas figured it was more of a sign to their attackers that they were armed as well instead of trying to kill someone.

"Come on! Stay low!" Brenda shouted, pulling Thomas to his feet and shoving him in the direction of the closest house while still firing her gun. Several more shots were fired from the opposing side, none hitting its mark but most of them too close for comfort.

"Holy shit!" Thomas exclaimed as he tried to swallow his heart back down into his chest. He jumped over a dog fence, crept close to the facade of a blue-painted villa and stopped behind the corner on the backyard. Brenda tried to push him on, but stopped when a voice echoed in the street through a megaphone.

"Come out with your hands above your head and the gun where I can see it!" The voice was male, raspy but not very low. The megaphone intensified the edge the voice had. "Deadly force will only be used if you do not comply immediately."

"To hell with that, they just shot at us!" Thomas hissed. Brenda slapped him across the cheek and held a finger in front of her mouth, warning Thomas not to make another sound.

The megaphone man continued. "Come out with your hands and firearms above your head. I will not repeat myself a third time."

Thomas moved passed Brenda, who tried to pull him back, and sneaked a glance around the corner. He saw only the front yard, but through fences and bushes he saw several somebodies moving forward in synchronised fashion down the road. They pointed about them with stick-like metalware—shotguns—and seemed to wear black military armour.

"They've cut us off," Thomas hissed. "We can't get back to the house."

Brenda whacked Thomas across the back of the head. He looked at her with fire in his eyes, but she held her hands up like he was an idiot and pointed to something behind them. There was a hedge separating them from the neighbouring house. Through the leaves they could see an empty driveway and, of course, another street. Thomas felt stupid.

They waited until the man with the megaphone started speaking again, then Brenda fired her gun at a window across the street, just in front of the marching, black-clad soldiers. Their attention flew that way immediately, and Thomas and Brenda used the moment to scurry across the exposed backyard and crawl through the thankfully quite permeable bushes.

"Come on, run!" Brenda called between closed teeth.

She darted down the driveway, Thomas at her heels, both holding on to their duffel bags for dear life. Their escape had not passed unnoticed, but there was still two houses between them and their pursuers. The man with the megaphone called out for them to halt, his voice growing more distant. They'd made it half a block when the soldiers started firing their weapons at them again. One, two, three bullets sizzled by Thomas's ears. He ran like he had never run before, using the backpack as protection behind the back of his head, as if he actually believed it could stop a bullet.

"In here!" Brenda called behind him. He'd ran past her, and now she was hurling herself down a side street leading up through a park and into a small forest. There was a playground football court with worn-down goalposts lining on side of the dirt path, and the front yard of a clubhouse on the other.

"What were you thinking!? This is open ground!" Thomas yelled.

"I'm sorry!" Brenda called back.

Just then, after a few seconds of silence, another shower of bullets rained down over them. Thomas saw his last few days of survival lose their meaning completely before his eyes. He saw it all come to an abrupt stop and end in nothingness—all with the hit of even one of these deadly projectiles. Then he heard a grunt unlike any other and watched as Brenda tumbled to the ground, a spray of blood painting the ground where her left foot had just touched down.

Thomas skidded to a halt and hovered above Brenda on the ground, stunned and helpless. The gunshots seized. The trampling of boots came closer. Brenda spasmed in pain by Thomas's feet, holding her left ankle as blood soaked her pants and the sleeves of her dirty, grey shirt.

Thomas looked behind him. There were two soldiers running toward them, each with their weapons hot and aimed. They yelled for the teenagers to stop. At the moment, they weren't firing.

_Only two of them_. Thomas acted fast, without thinking. He threw himself to his knees, grabbed Brenda's gun which has been thrown from her hand into the gravel, and fired several rounds at the oncoming soldiers. To his great surprise, one of them dropped backwards at the second shot. When his comrade turned around to look, Thomas's fifth shot hit him clean in the back of his head.

The soldier went down, the weapons falling from his hands. For a moment, Thomas could not see what he had done and fired another round into empty air.

With too much adrenalin running through his system, Thomas threw the gun aside and pulled the straps of his backpack back onto his shoulders. He stood up, then crouched down to try and lift Brenda onto his back. When he figured out that he couldn't lift her like that he resorted to pulling her off the path and across the front yard of the clubhouse. She didn't help much, but she didn't fight him either. He pulled her by the arms around the building, hoping against hope for a cellar door to break open. What he found was a wooden porch, supported with poles about three or four decimetres off the ground.

He didn't stop to think if this was a good plan or not, but went to his knees and started rolling Brenda in underneath the porch. There were weeds and dirt and insects, but he kept going, crawling in after her and pushing her body until they hit the wall of the house. The wooden planks of the porch were tightly set and let no light through, putting their hiding spot in complete blackness. Brenda groaned in pain. Thomas put his hands over her mouth and listened, but there was no sound apart from his own racing heartbeat and their breathing.

As the first minutes of what would be a long, long time of waiting ticked by, the first coherent thought hit Thomas like a runaway train. It left him feeling unreal and rotten to the core. He'd held a guns before, but never actually fired one. But today he had not only fired a gun, more than once.

He had killed someone with it.


End file.
